Artist Quotes

I came in on the decline. Phil Elliot was in first, he got his book out, he sold thirteen thousand, I think he got two issues out before I got mine in, this was March '87. He was out in December '86.

He would still see it as his duty to shut up and get on with it, not cause any trouble. In our own time we've made a hero of the rebel, and it's more heroic to speak up.

By March '87 we're down to seven thousand, by the end of the year we're down to twelve hundred. The whole bottom just fell out of the market. It was bad for me because I was in Australia at the time.

And when you look at the Turtle's movie there is something there, definitely something there.

All that political stuff Delano was doing. Me, I've gone off the top, into total fantasy.

I'd be interested to read Gull's paper on it, and I wish Alan would put it in somewhere. It gives him a relevance to our times, which he doesn't otherwise have. Gull, I mean, not Alan.

Dave Sim said in his latest thing of his, 'when you're on the right track, you'll know it, but until you get there, you have to believe you're on the right track'. Interesting little conundrum. It's not easy.

Thunder and lightning. I have never - never - skied in thunder and lightning. It was a trip, for sure.

The more I paint the more I like everything.

I wanted to build up a name for myself.

I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.

The country makes me more paranoid, you know? I think the crazy people out there are little crazier.

I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.

Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.

Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I'll do some great, awful painting about her.

I thought I was going to be a bum the rest of my life.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

Believe it or not, I can actually draw.

I start a picture and I finish it.

I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.

Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.

There is, however, a change going on in the world. There's far more interest in drawing now than there has been in a long, long time. Schools are beginning to teach drawing again in a serious and meaningful way.

The art schools... you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it.

Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.

Of course, I did lots of what would be called graphic design now, what used to be called commercial art.

It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.

I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.

I think the leaders inevitably express the people they are leading.

I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.