All great truths begin as blasphemies.
Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's 'supposed' to be done, following the same old trends, well, that's just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else.
I have always been driven to buck the system, to innovate, to take things beyond where they've been.
Whoever has an original thing to say, it is sort of a threat to the status quo.
To be able to create fully, it's maybe fine that you learn the rules, but you have to forget and to rebel against those rules.
As much as we were very proud of being a pop band, I know we never felt like we fit into that category.
To overturn orthodoxy is no easier in science than in philosophy, religion, economics, or any of the other disciplines through which we try to comprehend the world and the society in which we live.
It's always better to shock people and change people's expectations than to give them exactly what they think you can do. It's not unexpected for me to be in a comedy film anymore; I'm no longer the underdog in that world. Not that I'm great or good at it or anything, it's just that I've done a bunch of them, so you're not shocked.
I want to go to places that are unexpected of me because people really think they have me pegged.
When it comes to drag, my favorite thing we can do is kind of push against the beauty standards of magazines. We don't need to look like supermodels. That what really makes drag special and makes it unique and makes it queer.
That's the job of art: to undo the logic of the world.
I typically do the opposite of what people think I am going to do.
The character I've created, Christine, is mainly the first attempt for me to escape all the secret injunctions we have as girls all the time. Like, be pretty but be polite. Don't take too much space. All those things that didn't mean anything to me. I just decided to turn them around with my character.
I used to love 'Ladies Night' by Lil' Kim so much that I performed it in school without really knowing what it was about. I just knew that she was getting at a guy and winning.
It's the job of intellectuals and writers to cast doubt on perfection.
For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions - as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire.
An understandable prejudice of intellectual life leads us to view tilters at orthodoxy as courageous front-line innovators.
I've had a lot of folks tell me that my songs weren't quite country because they didn't really sound like anybody that had come along and done it before me. I felt a little out of place for a while.
Yes. Otherwise I could have done a lot of Hollywood movies. After Crouching Tiger I got a lot of offers, but I turned them down because they were all victim roles - poor girls sold to America to be a wife or whatever. I know I have the ability to go deeper, to take on more original roles than that.
I could program a 'fabulous, I love it' kind of hit season right now. I'm more interested in breaking boundaries, telling a story, defying a truth that has been accepted.
We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our education system.
I've made a career of being a contrarian. If I'm going to work with Tom Cruise, it's my instinct to be like, 'Well, I'm going to do the anti-Tom Cruise movie.'
If contemporary artists sincerely seek to be original, unique, and new, they should begin by disregarding the notions of originality, individuality, and innovation: they are the cliches of our time.
My goal is to make a movie that no one would sort of expect me to make.
I call myself a traditionalist, although I have fought against tradition all my life.
