Quotes about Expression

As an artist, you want as many people as possible to see your work with no interference. And usually, I've gone onto fringe channels: BBC Two, HBO, Channel 4.

I always liked the idea that you can put something in you onto a canvas or a piece of paper and have it exist there and not inside you. It's a way to control things.

When we walk onto that stage I'm not feeling like I'm ruled by any other band.

I'm a very opinionated person and when I feel something I have to say it.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

I usually say what I really think. A great mistake nowadays. It makes one so liable to be misunderstood.

Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote 'King Lear.

The only artists I have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfect uninteresting in what they are.

The arts that have escaped [uniformity] best are the arts in which the public take no interest. Poetry is an instance of what I mean. We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it.