Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I think we can only ultimately change the world by example and by fearlessly embracing what could happen.
My father gave me a copy of 'Seven Years in Tibet,' and that's what turned me on to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.
I met William Burroughs in 1971. I got his address through a magazine and went to London to spend time with him.
When Lady Gaga wears a meat dress, it's meant to be controversial, but then it turns into money, and it's all fine.
The great irony was that the punks were more conservative and narrow-minded and musically bigoted that anyone else.
With Thobbing Gristle, that era from '75 to '81 was a period when the politics of the time demanded anger and rage.
It turns out that there's a huge community of African-American musicians whose main influence is Throbbing Gristle.
'Pagan Day' was Alex Fergusson's idea. It was him that encouraged me to start making music again and start Psychic TV.
the voluntary relinquishing of responsibility for our lives and our actions is one of the greatest enemies of our time.
It has always been my belief that creation, the making of 'art' in any medium or combination of mediums, is a holy act.
I was very good friends with Ian Curtis from Joy Division. In fact, I was the last person he spoke with before he died.
Humans have to realise they're not individuals but individual parts of the same organism, with responsibility to each other.
The biggest way to say, philosophically, you'll never be part of a war is to look completely the opposite of anyone in a war.
To be an 'artist' is as much a calling from and to a divine service as becoming a physician, nurse, priest, shaman, or healer.
People say, ''I'm a woman trapped in a man's body'' or ''I'm a man trapped in a woman's body,'' but I say ''I'm trapped in a body.''
We must embrace unity, not separation - sharing, go back to small, caring communities. Unity, not separation, is what has to happen.
In the art world, sentimentality and intimacy and the emotive side of lives are considered very uncool. There's nervousness around intimacy.
We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.
My father enlisted at the age of 17. He lied about his age because he wanted to ride the fastest motorbikes, which were with the British army.
The human body is not the person. Identity is the way the brain operates; it's memories, it's sensory input and output. The mind is the person.
Within TG, we liberated the use of the lyric forever. There was no longer a taboo on what could be discussed in the conceptual format of a song.
Every few years, you have to change your strategy. You have to look at how the world is mutating, and mutate. Not in the same way but in parallel.
A lot of the conceptualists and the prestige galleries are debasing themselves in presentations which have little else to them but the presentation.
If we confound and break up the proposed unfolding the world impresses upon us, we can give ourselves the space to consider what we want to be as a species.
Lady Jaye dressed me in her clothes the first day we met. The love we had was so strong, we wished we could become one. Then we thought, 'Why shouldn't we?'
The gender is irrelevant; the identity is the one you should try and create for yourself by yourself, and the narrative of your own life becomes your own book.
Once you're looking for wisdom, you have to look at why things happen and why people behave how they do: you cannot, in all conscience, accept any form of prejudice.
Why is there no cure for cancer? Because the medical industry doesn't want one! And the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want one! Because they would lose too much money!
Even if the world outside is destroying itself and fragmented and paranoid and fearful, the job of the artist is to embrace and hold people and say, 'It's OK, be safe here.'
The good thing about people who are corporate is that they're stupid. So they can be touching something that's precious or radical or special, and they miss the point completely.
That's really the whole point of art - it's to take something commonplace and draw people on a path so that, all of a sudden, they have a new impression of everything around them.
All the people at university were very aristocratic - except me, because I was on scholarship. And everyone there voluntarily wore suits and ties every day. And this was in the '60s!
Industrial culture? There has been a phenomena; I don't know whether it's strong enough to be a culture. I do think what we did has had a reverberation right around the world and back.
Somebody once asked me, 'What do you do?' and I flippantly answered 'I'm a cultural engineer.' With hindsight, I kind of am - but if I got too self-conscious about it, it wouldn't work.
The status quo is presented as something to aspire to, whereas for us, the status quo was something we wanted to shatter in order to create the space for people to choose for themselves.
There's a moment for everybody when you look at that picture of Jesus in the church and think, 'This doesn't totally make sense.' If God made everything, then who made God? We have no idea.
People have become obsessed with the greed of celebrity and self-branding and wanting to be known and recognized and succeed in some way, and they're not prepared to share and help each other.
Writing is a recording that you can cut up and reassemble. Sound is something you can cut up and reassemble. Film, video - you know, the main tools of culture - can all be cut up and reassembled.
I think one of the gorgeous things about TG is that we will go from something amazingly serious and important and significant in terms of the world and life, and then do something ludicrous and absurd.
I would experiment with porridge - make porridge pancakes, fry porridge - and so friends started calling me 'Porridge.' But I got to feel that I was becoming a character, a work of fiction, in a sense.
What's incredible with Trent Reznor is how he took all the alienation and the rejection of traditional rock and found a way to encapsulate it in a form that made the public finally get industrial music.
After thee accumulation of too much history we have lost our innocence, we cannot easily believe in any explanations. We describe rather than feel, we touch rather than explore, we lust rather than adore.
The punk rockers said, 'Learn three chords and form a band.' And we thought, 'Why learn any chords?' We wanted to make music like Ford made cars on the industrial belt. Industrial music for industrial people.
We were already, in 1981, bemoaning the fact that people were using certain accessorised ideas and images that they connected with us - sort of strange buildings and neo-fascist regimes and the 'dark side' of human culture.
England was very frustrating in the Seventies for anyone who was trying to wake up. It was visible in punk, in clothes, and in the revival of mods and rockers fighting. All kinds of things were going on that just weren't individual to myself.
I think, with TG, in our own ways, we have been committed to the idea of evolution on some level and change on some level - that human behaviour may not be changeable, but one has to try and be optimistic and work towards content that might signify change.
When the blues came out, it was something pure and undefined, but when all these white groups got hold of it, it became something else that didn't sound anything like the original. So you had Led Zeppelin doing their thing, which had come all the way from the blues.
In the old days, maybe we'd come across Captain Beefheart, buy a record, go, 'This is great!' and notice how his music is evolving, changing, and becoming more complex, more radical. And we would follow that progression and see it reflected in the alternative culture it came from.
I always felt that everything that happened was incredibly exhilarating and massively puzzling at the same time. I can even remember, when I was six or seven, digging a hole beneath a tree. And I would go into this tomb, this cave that I had made, and would lie there, meditating, for hours.
The great irony was that, while I was being portrayed as a monster, I was in Khatmandu with my children, doing soup kitchens for Tibetan refugees, using all the money from my records to feed three hundred people a day, and working with monks connected to the Sammye Ling Buddhist centre in Scotland.