Quotes from Sebastian Horsley

Think of how many boring, blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretion of me.

Being a dandy is a condition rather than a profession. It is a defense against suffering and a celebration of life.

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more.

I do a lot of things for effect, which is not to say I am superficial, but that I know how to put ideas across.

I have wanted only one thing to make me happy. That thing is everything.

A woman is supposed to have curves like an old Bentley, not like some old bike.

I like living sparsely. In the main room, there's no furniture - no tables, no chairs, no coffee table - not even a decaffeinated coffee table.

Unhappiness lies in that gap between our talents and our expectations.

I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say 'pass the mustard'.

I am desperate for attention. But everyone else is too. Everyone has fantasies of fame and greatness. Life for most people is a process of shedding those fantasies.

If I want to dislike women, I should be allowed to. As it happens, I love them. Women to me are privately worshipped and publicly disdained.

I keep the shutters closed because I like to work in a hermetic environment. I like mirrors. When you look out of the window, all you see is ugliness, but when you look in the mirror all you see is beauty.

The problem with compassion is that it is not photogenic.

I don't talk, I quote. I can't help it. It's better to be quotable than honest.

My theory is that the way you cope with the depths will ascertain the heights that you reach - they are intimately connected - and if you have a lust for life, you are also going to have a lust for death.

[…] life is just the misery left between abortion and euthanasia […]

I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet.

I regret everything. But so what? At least I have cause.

Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't - he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere - much more Calvinistic, more neurotic - it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.

The problem I've got is that I really, really like drugs. I love everything about them. It is horrific being sober all the time-utterly awful.

I like to remind myself that every morning I'm making a choice to live.

If I hear that people are litigious, I immediately dismiss them.

People who have a reputation for being evil are usually good.

I live my life like an open book, even though it's open on the wrong page.