I believe that I understand gangs better than others. Because they're formed out of necessity. They're formed by people to keep from being suppressed.

I was a gang leader. Although, it was a gang for defensive purposes. It was not a gang to sell drugs.

Performance art can involve the audience with taste, smell and sounds not available with electronic media and not practical with conventional theater. This is due to the usually small audience.

A performance art piece is unprecedented. It is difficult to censor since it has a good possibility of never being done before.

We're all so mauled by information, but it's recycled information. We need to shut it out. So, you've got to get bizarre. This is an artist's purpose - to break away from the recycled. Performance art can do that.

Basically the school system sets you up with what it wants to set you up with. They're really good at it. I think they're too good. Problem is, what they're doing is conditioning kids to merely accept the culture at hand. But the rebels won't accept it.

It is better to go down in infamy than to never go down at all.

All good performance pieces have some philosophical validity. That's the difference between mere theater and performance art.

I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.

This is why my art is about violence. Because I was subjected to so much of it as a kid. After that, and a lot of thinking, I became less violent. I realized that there must be other ways. So, I started to pursue them.

At one point, when I was 20 and living in Kentucky, I got shot - it was a land dispute over six inches of property that ran a hundred yards through my grandfather's land. It was really over the honor of my family and that of another family.

The act is truth. Nothing that was ever recorded is truth. Nothing that was ever said is truth. Only the act.

I'm still very aware of the violence in our culture, more so than other people. I know where it comes from when someone is trying to suppress someone else, sometimes they fight back.

Maybe it will be a great thing when the Baby Boomers finally die out. In real life, it's not a matter of the good guys or the bad guys. Rather, it's big numbers and small numbers that do the counting.

My 80-year-old mother will not buy her heart medicine because it cost more than she can pay with social security. She is America.

My parents were laborers so we lived on South Park, which was a low-income region of Seattle. You had a choice - you either joined or formed a gang or you let others bully you.

Performance art can be produced in a coffee house setting.

My art and poetry is very political now. Because you've got to find that truth within you and express yourself. Somewhere out there, I know, there will be people who will listen.

My kids are free to do what ever they want. Because I only advise. I don't make them do anything.

But my patriotism goes for something beyond what we have. We don't have something that I want to die for - anymore.

Performance art is the ultimate in creativity. Since it has so many possibilities at creativity, it's essence tends to become creativity.

Freedom. It's not something you go out and die for.

I've been in elementary education for years and my belief is that Christmas pageants in schools are little more than conditioning kids for the Christian religion.

I believe that I understand gangs better than others. Because they're formed out of necessity. They're formed by people to keep from being suppressed.

Retirement to me does not mean nothing to do but the realization of the decisions I made in the past. That I made in my life.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

What I try to do for my readers is to pass on some of the things that I found out about being thirteen after doing it for forty years.

In this watering-place I acted an heroic character, badly studied; and being a novice on such a stage, I forgot my part before a pair of lovely blue eyes.

Young people discovering their sexuality must know they walk with a strong tradition and that they are not alone. They have a right to information without being pressured.

Being a publicist is like management in a lot of ways - you're their friend, you're their mother, you're their confidante.

I mean, all alternative comedy is are comedians that have being doing it for so long, for so long, that they were relaxed enough to start becoming personal on stage.

I became hooked on the idea of being able to shoot an image and process it myself, and end up with a product.

Being a cover artist is not like being a real artist. That's just copying what someone else did.

It is too maddening. I've got to fly off, right now, to some devilish navy yard, three hours in a seasick steamer, and after being heartily sick, I'll have to speak three times, and then I'll be sick coming home. Still, who would not be sick for England?

I don't like being recognised, I have no interest in being famous at all, I just do what I do. If I could be like Captain Kirk and beam myself up and then beam myself down, I would!

I'm glad I'm not Brezhnev. Being the Russian leader in the Kremlin. You never know if someone's tape recording what you say.

Being a musician is what I do, but it's not what I am.

We're all like children. We may think we grow up, but to me, being grown up is death, stopping thinking, trying to find out things, going on learning.

We've had it very clear to the Bosnians that our obligation to equip and train their forces is completely conditional on the foreign forces being gone.

My parents were amazing people who had no business being together - and they knew it.

Teachers started recognizing me and praising me for being smart in science and that made me want to be even smarter in science!

Sure, I get the blues. But what I try to do, is apply joy to the blues, you know? I don't know if it's a technique, or just being bent that way, being raised by the folks I was raised by.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

The judge turned his back towards me, sitting back on his judge's chair, while I was in the witness stand being questioned. The whole courtroom was full of these anarchists, leftists, communists and Jewish lobbyists.

For me, being in front of the camera and training go hand in hand.

I define success as being comfortable with yourself and your life. And that is about as good as it gets, really.

Being injured is something that happens in this sport. Anybody who gets into it understands that.

PR is extremely important, and being able to use it in the right way means everything. You have to market your success.

Being ill like this combines shock - this time I will die - with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself.