Change comes from reflection.
Genesis P-Orridge
Once you believe things are permanent, you're trapped in a world without doors.
We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.
When in doubt, make no sense. No sense is good. And nonsense is good.
What's incredible with Trent Reznor is how he took all the alienation and the rejection of traditional rock and found a way to encapsulate it in a form that made the public finally get industrial music.
The human body is not the person. Identity is the way the brain operates; it's memories, it's sensory input and output. The mind is the person.
We've always said Psychic TV's music is the sum total of who's in it at the time.
Everyone is telling the truth all of the time... well, it's just that times change.
The punk rockers said, 'Learn three chords and form a band.' And we thought, 'Why learn any chords?' We wanted to make music like Ford made cars on the industrial belt. Industrial music for industrial people.
It has always been my belief that creation, the making of 'art' in any medium or combination of mediums, is a holy act.
As a little boy, I never felt comfortable with being human.
I really feel that I've been unjustly exorcised from the story of psychedelic music.
I've always aimed to create something pure.
Even if the world outside is destroying itself and fragmented and paranoid and fearful, the job of the artist is to embrace and hold people and say, 'It's OK, be safe here.'
If we confound and break up the proposed unfolding the world impresses upon us, we can give ourselves the space to consider what we want to be as a species.
Things don't happen in a vacuum, and artists don't make work in a vacuum.
I'm not a man trapped in a woman's body. I'm a brain trapped in a human body.
You have an absolute right to translate poetry in any form with any sound. It's all up for grabs.
Lady Jaye and I always thought black eyes were really sexy.
When Lady Gaga wears a meat dress, it's meant to be controversial, but then it turns into money, and it's all fine.
To be an 'artist' is as much a calling from and to a divine service as becoming a physician, nurse, priest, shaman, or healer.
Pleasure is a cultural weapon. Use it wisely.
Humans have to realise they're not individuals but individual parts of the same organism, with responsibility to each other.
We all fall into biological and mental habits. It's an easy way for us to navigate day-to-day work and life, but it also doesn't do us any favours in terms of growing into wisdom, growing into a greater understanding of each other, growing into a deeper relationship - all the things that we really crave.
'Pagan Day' was Alex Fergusson's idea. It was him that encouraged me to start making music again and start Psychic TV.
Haircuts are luxuries and, as such, should be as expensive as you can possibly afford.
Ian Curtis was a young genius.
Once you're looking for wisdom, you have to look at why things happen and why people behave how they do: you cannot, in all conscience, accept any form of prejudice.
I've always felt that all the music I've made is psychedelic, including Throbbing Gristle.
I met William Burroughs in 1971. I got his address through a magazine and went to London to spend time with him.
Life and art are inseparable.
We must embrace unity, not separation - sharing, go back to small, caring communities. Unity, not separation, is what has to happen.
I've had all my teeth replaced with solid gold replicas of the originals.
My artwork is in order to seduce people into thinking.
I always felt that everything that happened was incredibly exhilarating and massively puzzling at the same time. I can even remember, when I was six or seven, digging a hole beneath a tree. And I would go into this tomb, this cave that I had made, and would lie there, meditating, for hours.
I believe in being completely open to the most unlikely explanation.
Why is there no cure for cancer? Because the medical industry doesn't want one! And the pharmaceutical industry doesn't want one! Because they would lose too much money!
There is no distinction between reverence for existence and our senses and/or apathy.
The body is simply the suitcase that carries us around.
I was very good friends with Ian Curtis from Joy Division. In fact, I was the last person he spoke with before he died.
Imagination should always be treasured, even when it's slightly off-key.
All culture, all important culture, is always linked to how people express and experience being alive.
The good thing about people who are corporate is that they're stupid. So they can be touching something that's precious or radical or special, and they miss the point completely.
I refer to myself as 'we.'
Human beings are not capable of creating a thought that truly conceives of this existence. Nobody knows if we are really here, alive, or anything. It's a mystery.
Humanity is a virus.
We were already, in 1981, bemoaning the fact that people were using certain accessorised ideas and images that they connected with us - sort of strange buildings and neo-fascist regimes and the 'dark side' of human culture.
The gender is irrelevant; the identity is the one you should try and create for yourself by yourself, and the narrative of your own life becomes your own book.
Any artist should stay challenged as long as possible.
I am so sick and tired of being told what I'm supposed to look like!
