Unconventional Artists Quotes

The truly creative people tend to be outliers.

Painters are noted for being dissipated and wild.

It evoked Picasso and Miles Davis for me — two great artists who totally indulged themselves in their work and who they were, but they certainly didn't give a damn what other people thought.

Prince, you never knew what to expect from him from one album to the next. Miles Davis was like that. You know, once you get used to one style, boom, he switched it and, you know, switched gears on you. So those artists are very exciting to me, very exciting to follow their path, you know, and their journey.

Art itself has become an extraordinary thing - the activity of peculiar people - people who become more and more peculiar as their activity becomes more and more extraordinary.

Baltimore breeds a really specific type of weirdo. Animal Collective is from Baltimore. Dan Deacon, John Waters. There's a through line of weirdness and a hard edge that I see when I meet people from that area.

I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot

I'm much more interested in lesser-known eccentrics and characters and performers. Like Matthew Buchinger, who was born in Germany in 1674, had no arms or legs and yet did magic, and had 14 kids, and made the most extraordinary calligraphy.

A lot of poets too live on the margins of social acceptance, they certainly aren't in it for the money. William Blake - only his first book was legitimately published.

Some of the most successful artists are the weirdest ones - look at Lady Gaga. I've done shows with her and she's amazing.

That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.

Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists and pronounced lunatics; they are often authors and artists