Quotes About Identity

To think about "oblivion" is to think about "what art is".

Most people say I look mean, and because I play so many tough roles and because of my size and my martial arts background, they think I am, but I'm really not.

If you really want to hurt your parents and you don't have nerve enough to be homosexual, the least you can do is go into the arts.

When I was a kid, a book I read advised young artist to be themselves. That decided it for me. I was a corny kind of guy, so I went in for corn.

Every piece of art is a mirror and serves the function of reflectivity to expose to you and reveal to you more of who you are.

Color and I are one. I am a painter.

Lookin at herself, but wishing she was someone else because the body of the doll that don't look like hers at all. So she straps it on, she sucks it in, she throws it up and gives a grin.

Actors have no color. That's the art form.

I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )

All these poses of classical torture ruined my mind like a snake in the orchard. I did go from wanting to be someone, now I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue.

I wanted to jeopardize my own image. With my image I had already produced art pieces such as videos of photographs.

It is not what an artist does that counts...but what he is.

With the Ford Foundation grant all of a sudden instead of being an artist that had made a couple of short films, I became a filmmaker who dabbled in the arts.

As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it absolutely.

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

Fashion is every woman's language, and every woman's tool. Fashion is anatomy for me, creating your second skin is one of the most intimate art forms I can think of.

How can any person justify an aesthetic that reduces a woman or child to an emaciated skeleton? Is it art? Surely fashion's aesthetic should enhance and beautify the human form, not destroy it.

The arts are very alive in Ireland, so that had its influence on me. But I consider myself European, really.

Arty farty, you'll never fool your Aunt, who knew you picked your nose and wet your pants.

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

Ah, well, do I wish that we lived in a world where gender didn't figure so prominently? Of course. Do I even think about myself as a woman when I go to make art? Of course not.

What I'm trying to describe is that it's impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else's.... That somebody else's tragedy is not the same as your own.

What I am sad about is that there is now, in America, no equivalent to the art circuit.

Many Japanese painters and calligraphers would change their names intentionally to keep their relationship to the art always fresh. This way, others' expectations can be avoided.