Quotes About Expression

I wish I could just project everything on the paper,

To be an artist is to enter into competition with god.

Why do we write? A chorus erupts. Because we cannot simply live.

Writing is not some quiet, closet act.

I don't like answering to other people's philosophies. I don't have any philosophy, I just believe in stuff. Either I believe in something or I don't. Like, I believe in the Rolling Stones but not in the Dave Clark Five. There's nothing philosophic about it. Whenever I'm linked with a movement, it pisses me off.

I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it." - reference to Andy Warhol

He dreamed of amassing musicians from all over the world in Woodstock and they would sit in a field in a circle and play and play. It didn't matter what key or tempo or what melody, they would keep on playing through their discordance until they found a common language.

To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.

Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph.

Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. (1976 Penthouse interview)

He wasn't certain whether he was a good or bad person. Whether he was altruistic. Whether he was demonic. But he was certain of one thing. He was an artist. And for that he would never apologize.

It's not so easy writing about nothing.

I was attracted to Robert's work because his visual vocabulary was akin to my poetic one, even if we seemed to be moving toward different destinations. Robert always would tell me, "Nothing is finished until you see it.

Tearing things apart (is) a powerful aspect of human nature.

As far as I'm concerned, being any gender is a drag.

He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

I wrote to give myself something to read.

Your work, coming from a fluid source, can be traced to the naked song of your youth. You spoke then of holding hands with God. Remember, through everything, you have always held that hand, grip it hard, Robert, and don't let go. (letter to Robert Mapplethorpe, 1970)

I drew no line between life and art. I was the same on- as offstage.

Everything I came up with seemed irreverent or irrelevant.

Of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.

Secretly I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artist was to see what others could not.

An artist is somebody who enters into competition with God. The guy who built the Tower of Babel was the first artist. If I had to check out where I was in other centuries, I was his old lady. If I wasn't the guy, I was his chick. He knew that there was more and God got jealous. Even gods get uptight. Women make gods uptight. Everyone thinks of God as a man -- you can't help it -- Santa Claus was a man, therefore God has to be a man. But a man comes once. A woman never stops coming.