I don't think artists are made, I think they're born.

Man has done a lot to make himself dangerous and animals get the worst of all of it. But then, man too is an animal.

When I see a dolphin, I know it's just as smart as I am.

Johnny Rotten. He's a big fan of mine. I used to see him out in the audience in England and he'd stand up and holler. He's funny. Smart too, and a nice guy. Don't think he's a jerk because he isn't.

Most of modern rock and roll is a product of guilt.

I'd rather play a tune on a horn, but I've always felt that I didn't want to train myself. Because when you get a train, you've got to have an engine and a caboose. I think it's better to train the caboose. You train yourself, you strain yourself.

An audience can really lift you right up off the stage.

You can tell by the kindness of a dog how a human should be.

But I have been in some very beautiful churches, then I've looked outside and seen people starving to death.

You can almost judge how screwed up somebody is by the kind of toilet paper they use. Go in any rich house and it's some weird coloured embossed stuff.

I don't look like a desert person because I stay indoors most of the day and fool around at night. That's what the desert animals do - they don't have a tan either.

I think most people try to get others to see through their eyes.

That Sid Vicious was obviously a schizophrenic, kind of a mean one too.

I don't do lullabyes.

Bob Dylan impresses me about as much as... well, I was gonna say a slug but I like slugs.

I live in a Mobile Home - I've never had a house, except once; I rented a log cabin.

I'm interested in playing, not working.

The stars are matter, we're matter, but it doesn't matter.

I don't think artists are made, I think they're born.

I'd never just want to do what everybody else did. I'd be contributing to the sameness of everything.

I have no neighbours other than animals and Joshua Trees.

I needed to purge myself of all the attention my parents had given me - I wasn't neglected enough as a child.

I think Shakespeare is really the one. Words as music and music as words. Everything he wrote was good, which is really frightening.

I don't even know what sound is, much less what it's for. It isn't to make money that's for sure. I've never made any.

With my voice and my band, I can do anything.

The wind is a very difficult sound to get. It's always changing.

I would never kill a living thing, although I probably have inadvertently while driving automobiles.

James Brown is important because he decorates the clock correctly and he's good with lower mathematics. Don't get me wrong - he's good.

If you want to be a different fish jump out of school.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.

The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.

Because when the film was first mooted, the Beatles didn't like the idea at all. In fact they wouldn't have any part in it. And when Brian had committed them, it was part of a deal he did with United Artists, I think.

Artists are like everybody else.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

My proudest achievement has been the success of the shows and artists I have been involved with, because they were made in Britain.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.