Quotes About Self-expression

Not long ago, every time I did a picture shoot for a magazine, the photographer would ask me to show up wearing jeans and cowboy boots. They seemed to think I was a hillbilly. Now it's different. Now they're not quite sure what to make of me. And I show up wearing whatever I want.

I look back at old photographs and videotapes, and I go, Who was I trying to be? Who was I doing this for?

No, I do a bunch of things to entertain myself. I paint, I make music, I take photographs.

From birth until I went to art college when I was 19, there are perhaps less than a dozen photographs of me.

I say no to photographs. When people take my picture, I feel like they've taken a piece of me, and I can't get that back. It's soul-draining.

When I found photography, I found this other kind of portraiture of black families and black people who were photographing themselves or having themselves photographed in ways they wanted to be seen.

I played in bands very very young. I painted; I did photography, all kinds of things.

People see my photos and think I labor over my image and I'm this cool, brooding artist. But I'm just having fun with it.

People know what I look like. I take photos on my own, and I don't edit them, so people know.

I feel empowered the fact that I can look the way that I do on stage and in photos - I can look that way any time I want. And I feel like it's important message to other women that they can do it, too.

People enjoy photos of me by myself, and people also love to see how in love I am - it's a really beautiful thing to share with my fans, actually.

I find the sneeriness about 'selfie-culture' quite boring - I'm excited by young people taking control of their own images and finding out for themselves how much Photoshop has done for models.

I object to the actual phrase 'Follow me.' You've gotta be kidding! Why would I want to follow anybody else? Nor do I want them to follow me. The machinations of my life, the banalities - they're mine. They belong to me.

Once you are in full Sharon Needles mode, you don't feel fear, you don't feel physical pain, and you also don't feel your own moral filter any longer.

My own physicality, not an abstract idea, makes me a choreographer.

Here I am, a not over-good business man, a second-rate engineer. I can make poor mechanical drawings. I play the piano after a fashion. In fact, I am one of those proverbial Jack-of-all-trades who are usually failures. Why I am not, I can't tell you.

I can sit down at a piano or with a guitar and just chug away for hours and be perfectly content with whatever comes out. But when it comes to something that somebody else is going to listen to, then I do feel a great deal of pressure to do something that's exceptional, at least in what I consider to be at the limits of what I can do.

I draw and play the piano badly. But when I'm doing those things, I'm concentrating so hard there's no room for worry. I find that onstage, too.

The things I do outside of playing the piano are done out of an inner necessity, not just because I want to try my hand at different things.

When I was a kid, my parents gave me piano lessons and guitar lessons for a while, but I was never very good at it. I have big, sort of awkward hands. It's hard to keep going when you don't get any better.

Our artistic heroes tend to be those self-exercisers, like Picasso, and Nabokov, and Wallace Stevens, who rather defiantly kept playing past dark.

Each of you, as an individual, must pick your own goals. Listen to others, but do not become a blind follower.

If you have to change something about you to be in a part, I don't think it's easy to do. You should just pick the part where you can just be yourself.

I've never had someone pick outfits for me. Almost everything I get is from Goodwill.