What I don't like is when people feel like they can box an artist into who they think an artist should be.
Artists are the worst [people]. They are selfish, self-centred; they don't care what happens.
Artists are rarely members of the popular crowd.
I knew how the suits used to talk about the artists, with barely concealed contempt. So I knew what was waiting for me round the corner. Because I wasn't one of those very unusual people like Neil Diamond or Elton John, whose careers just seem to span the decades. I knew I wasn't one of them.
In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior. In America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.
Great artists are modest almost as seldom as they are faithful to their wives.
There are a few musicians that I know who seem on the outside like very asocial or somewhat unemotional people, people who aren't capable of emotions, and people think they're very cold inside.
When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'
Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories.
People often expect me to be very serious, but it's not like my record company told me not to smile in photographs, because I was like that anyway.
I think that most people think painters are kind of ridiculous, you know?
Coming from Britain, I was terrified of meeting all these other artists, because artists over there tend to fight with each other a lot, the premise being that there's not enough room for everybody.
Painters were also attorneys, happy storytellers of anecdote, psychologists, botanists, zoologists, archaeologists, engineers, but there were no creative painters.
Most artists like to think of themselves as rugged individualists, as independent characters.
All my artist buddies make fun of me for being such a sensitive human being.
The popular mythology of creative genius depends on beloved stereotypes of the artist in youth and old age: the misunderstood upstart who forces us to see the world afresh; and the revered sage who shows us depths of insight attainable only through a lifetime of hard-won experience.
A singer has got a different attitude, they're they're so whacked out they don't know what they're doing half the time. Singers, they don't, they're spoiled too.
Most people on the outside think that being an artist is like the best thing ever in the world and it's so easy, and like, all you have to do is just sit and look pretty and sing songs.
I have to say it's better to be an actor, only because people worry about what time you go to sleep and what you dress like. As opposed to a writer, where it's like, "Oh I'm in my New York University sweatshirt and I'm not wearing pants." You're not worried about what you're eating or anything. It's all a part of your process.
The most surprising and rewarding chapter to write was the Butthole Surfers chapter. I'd always thought of them as a bunch of drug-addled reprobates - which maybe they were - but it turned out to be more complicated than that.
