Quotes from Laurie Simmons

I've always gone for a kind of perfection.

We don't have real hours and we don't have a boss, so artists create rules for themselves that they then break. It's transgressive in such a personal way.

My father was a dentist. And my mother was a - do we still say "housewife"? A home engineer.

I think, with my own daughters, rather than preaching a feminine agenda, I just really try to help them understand what it meant to be a woman in the late 20th century and the consciousness of how to be a woman in the 21st century: What is working for you and what is working against you.

I never could have predicted that I would have done something that could be called portraiture.

I'm innately conservative, and painting is an ideal place to exercise a progressive conservatism. I operate well within limits.

My favourite thing is to discover what someone does well and say, 'Do that for me.'

I was always very proud of myself that I could wrest emotion from a doll or a puppet. It never occurred to me that I could find real emotion in a person.

Oh god, success is so exhausting.

Who knew that being an artist was a glamour job?

I'm very interested in stopping time. And starting time. There is that aspect of time that I'm playing with, that it's elusive and unnoticed yet really in the end the most important thing.

My subject has always been women. And I don't want to sound, like, preposterously idealistic, but I would like, in my lifetime, to experience a world where women, all kind of women, can connect and support each other.

I don't like touching things that are the curatorial flavor of the month.

Like all artists, I'm a complete cinephile; I see everything. I see past movies, present movies, indie movies, experimental movies.

I'm way more influenced by my children than I was by my parents.

People are much more willing nowadays to believe that pictures lie than [that] they can express any kind of truth.

I had grown up in a world dominated by women - I had aunts and sisters and great-aunts - and I just felt like I lived in a completely female world.

I think that I came of age in the 1970s with my own work, and it was a time of conceptual and process art, and it was very important not to tell a story. If you told a story, when I was a young artist and first came to N.Y., it was, like, an embarrassing way to make art.

From the time I started taking photographs, I started working with plastics. I've always treated plastic like it was marble or gemstone or fine glass. I've always gotten the most out of it. I love it!

Your ringtone is so personal to you, but the fact is millions of other people have your ringtone. I really love that connection, and call me crazy, but I find the iPhone ringtones super melodic and very danceable.

I think the art world is one of the last bastions of this kind of sexism where there is a mythology about a woman not being able to be both and artist and a mother: that some very important creative crystal inside a woman would be shattered by the idea of having a child.

There's part of our culture where uniqueness is celebrated and appreciated and another part of our culture where this one way to be - one color hair, one sized breasts, one kind of nose - that's also front and center.

I think the big news there - most post-menopausal women I know are not celibate.

I'm not interested in telling a story in my photographic work. I'm more interested in freezing certain moments in time.