Quotes from Grayson Perry

Success in the art world means getting invitations to exhibit in some great places. I had shown in contemporary art museums in Europe, America, New Zealand and Japan. I'd also been asked to curate shows, and had made work to go with my selections from historical collections.

I always say to people if you want to see what Britain looks like, watch Gogglebox. It's brilliant and funny and warm and clever.

I did basic embroidery and can probably mend a sock.

Art is a process. Its expressing yourself and doing something, and throwing yourself into it and getting better at it and trying again. Thats what its about.

I think if people really want music they'll search it out.

If youre sure that everything youre going to do is going to be good, then whats the point? I used to think of it as just crippling self-doubt. Now I kind of see it as a sign that Im teetering on the edge of something new. Or troubling.

You want someone in the ballpark and then you grow together. Thats what a relashionship's about: changing each other.

Gender is great, and Im happy for anybody to celebrate wherever they are on the gender spectrum. Its got amazingly much easier in my lifetime.

The best view is always from the mountain you've climbed.

Well, intellectual importance is directly linked to financial value in the art world. I mean, thats the thing you really want - museum quality. You want to go down in the annals of art history.

I hate it when people say that art shouldnt be a commodity. A lot of the rooms in museums, and all the Frieze week events, are there because of high-end art collectors.

I was sort of mute when I went to art school. There were two girls there who thought I was German because I only grunted.

How art works is really interesting. It comes from our unconscious, a lot of it. And were communicating in ways were not completely aware of when were making it.

Part of being an artist is that you are achingly self-conscious about every aesthetic decision you make, and taste is at its most powerful when it's a default, unconscious decision because that's when all the influence of your childhood and background and society comes into play.

My great overall skill is spontaneity and winging it!

I often hear women approvingly describe themselves or other women as feisty. Feisty, I feel, has sexist implications, as if standing up for yourself was exceptional in a woman. It sounds like a word that a raffish Lothario would use about a difficult conquest.

I embrace the middle ground, because curiously it has more edge to it than the cutting edge. It has been a weirdly neglected path for the audience of contemporary art. Im making art not for people who dont like art, but for people who are interested but maybe alienated by the more esoteric pieces.

I never held myself as a nice person for most of my life.

I enjoyed the thought that hovering behind my work is a unifying belief system, just as there is behind Egyptian or Ancient Greek art. It just happens that the person who thought up the belief system behind my work is still around - ie, me.

My record-keeping hasnt improved much; I recently moved house and found five pots in the loft which had been unseen since the 80s and a dozen plates from the early 90s in a cupboard under a sink!

I did a psychotherapy day once, about class, and the first thing they did was get us to talk about our names. Of course, me, being called Grayson, everybody thinks its somehow unusual and classy. No, its bang-on aspirational working class.

The male role is heavily policed from birth, by parents, peers and bosses. Politicians in particular are harshly kept in line by a media that seems to uphold more bizarrely rigid standards of conformity than those held by any citizen.

To appreciate art you've got to work at it a bit.

A lot of people who work in computers think that the world is like them.