Quotes from Genesis P-Orridge

Change comes from reflection.

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.

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.

It has always been my belief that creation, the making of 'art' in any medium or combination of mediums, is a holy act.

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!

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.

All the great artists illustrate their approach to life in the work they make.

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.

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.

Life and art are inseparable.

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.

You have an absolute right to translate poetry in any form with any sound. It's all up for grabs.

A real New Yorker is always someone who came here from somewhere else to avoid some kind of persecution, often sexual-preference based, or to be discovered in one of the infinite-though-no-longer-thriving alternative scenes, i.e. theater, music, dance, vaudeville, art, drag, or, in those of the greatest egos, to be 'the next Andy Warhol.'

Once you believe things are permanent, you're trapped in a world without doors.

I'm not a man trapped in a woman's body. I'm a brain trapped in a human body.

Imagination should always be treasured, even when it's slightly off-key.

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.

'Star Trek' works for me because it deals with the petty issues of humankind.

I've discovered the joys of happiness.

Me and Lady Jaye hung out with Anita Pallenberg a few times in the house she lived in with Brian Jones.

Lady Jaye and I always thought black eyes were really sexy.

Mick Jagger is 70 and still singing 'Satisfaction' every concert. That would drive me insane.

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.

It turns out that there's a huge community of African-American musicians whose main influence is Throbbing Gristle.