Quotes About Expression

Queer art is as much about starting conversations as it is about making dramatic statements.

It's all very well to say this or that on Twitter and Facebook, but ultimately, if you are a musician, it is going to carry more weight if you make your statements through your craft.

It didn't matter what it was. I was always making bold statements at school. Ever since I've always had a passion for clothes, shoes and that type of stuff.

There are no statements in my paintings at all. Quite the opposite - I don't like people to go looking for them. If something makes me laugh, that's it.

I think that's the place ideally we'd like to get to as well, as queer people, where you can just judge the music for what it is and not just because it's gay. I think it's important that until we get to that place, statements have to be made, and we have to be loud and outward, so that's where I'm coming from.

I make my music to express everything I feel is necessary to communicate at a given time. Through music, I can express myself with statements that are more nuanced and more contradictory than factual details.

I don't use Twitter to share my thoughts - I use it to make statements that are quite blunt and hopefully fun.

As an artist, you're just observing the world around you. So much is overwhelming and it's all so inescapable that it can't all speak to general cultural statements.

Dancing has a continuity of its own that need not be dependent upon either the rise or fall of sound or the pitch and cry of words. Its force of feeling lies in the physical image, fleeting or static.

I make static art, not dynamic art. That's what I do.

One of my songs was on a jazz station for awhile. It was a song that I wrote for a jazz sax player friend of mine, and I sang and played the guitar on it.

If it's not going to sound like Terrapin Station, what's the point of playing Terrapin Station?

I'm a country singer, and I'm comfortable with that. But why does a country singer have to play only on country radio or a rock singer only on a rock station? I still don't understand why it's that big a deal.

The 'Station to Station' film is made entirely out of one-minute films, and each of the 62 minutes is a completely different person, place or encounter.

'Station to Station' is a series of happenings that go across the landscape. What is a happening? A happening is a moment in time. A moment in time that is not choreographed, where you don't know precisely what's going on. Where there are aspects of different layers of culture.

I think every actor fantasizes about a show where you get to play several characters in one piece and not just Detective Bluestone asking what time you were at the station.

I used to try and find inspirations everywhere - I would go to the airport or train station and just study people, the way they moved and interacted and their expressions. But I can't do that now, I'd be bombarded by people with their phones - selfie requests.

My dad used to get to the nastiest letters. But somebody had to take the time to type it, stamp it, send it to him, send it to the radio station. And I mean nasty stuff. It's not like nasty people with nasty opinions just popped up out of nowhere.

Because you have things like 'American Idol' and you've got radio stations that play music made entirely by computers, it's easy to forget there are bands with actual people playing actual instruments that rock.

I felt bad about the controversy because they stopped playing my songs on American radio stations. But there was nothing wrong with what I did. Now everybody sings the national anthem the way they want.

I had some really early recordings when I was 16 or 17. I was rapping over jungle beats with my friends. We used to do pirate radio stations in my area, down near Brighton. They were pretty terrible.

It's often the case that great artists - people like Bruce Springsteen - tend to pick up the subterranean rumblings of profound social change long before the economic statisticians notice them. Changes start long before they become statistics.

Your work is carved out of agony as a statue is carved out of marble.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist's own needs; a 'finished' statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work - related far more directly to the demands of communication.