Betty Dodson Quotes

I did large drawings of couples having sex! Men and woman enjoying intercourse and oral sex in a Madison Avenue Gallery? That was the first time I broke a barrier that made me think, some idiot is going to blow my brains out for sure.

I've been alienating my public since I was 20 years old. When 'American Buffalo' came out on Broadway, people would storm out and say, 'How dare he use that kind of language!' Of course I'm alienating the public! That's what they pay me for.

I like to provoke. I'm very French.

All good art is an indiscretion.

I don't have any interest in filmmakers making statements just for the sake of being provocative.

He found it was as easy to hurl beauty as anything else. (On Robert Mapplethorpe)

I curated this show [Shanghai Biennale ], I was by no means trying to shock people or be controversial.

I don't think that there's that much difference between a photograph of a fist up someone's ass and a photograph of carnations in a bowl.

I can't wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say "f off". But after a while you can get away with things.

You can find truly original pieces of writing, but they're original because you go, "Who would have even have thought of that?," or, "Why would anyone ever want to go see that?"

I don't know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can't print that.

There's such a freedom about being an artist... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing.

You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn't that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away?

Oops, I said on my d-ck. I aint really mean to say on my d-ck. But since we talking about my d-ck, all of you haters say hi to it.

I just go in the studio and do what I love to do. People will be people, they'll come and go, they'll like you then not like you, I just try to stay true to myself first and that's what most important because that way when you are successful you can stand up and say look, I did it my way and I did it the way that I wanted to do it.

The big moment came when it was decided to paint...Just To Paint. The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation, from Value- political, aesthetic, moral.

People who know my stage act know it's nothing but pushing boundaries.

A sculptor is supposed to be a dull dog anyway, so why should he not break out in colour sometimes, and in my case I'd as soon be hanged for a sheep as a lamb.

It is an artist's duty to be on the wrong end of the see-saw.

Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.

The last few years on ‘South Park’ we have done some of the riskiest things we have ever done, knowing it could kill the show, but we also know that’s what we have to do.

There were nude pictures... a lot of it is erotic or sexual. But I don't view my collection as dirty in any way. I view it as art.

I use really crazy subject matter, like all of those pictures of me throwing up and cutting myself, it's to make people think rather than be so mediocre. Instead of just seeing another girl with implants, I want to have meaning to what I do.

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

I worked at Disney many years ago. They just let me sit in a room for a couple of years and draw whatever I wanted to draw, so it's a very personal thing to me. Drawing and everything you do there is something meaningful and personal.