Because I love the man far too much, and am enjoying reading readily-assembled lists of the more interesting things that have spilled from his mouth and thought I'd share that enjoyment.
"Artists aren't really people. And I'm actually 40 per cent papier mache. "
"I think I'm a realist. Which people who don't like me consider to be pessimism. It isn't pessimism at all. If I was a pessimist I wouldn't get up, I wouldn't shave, I wouldn't watch Batman at 7:30 a.m. Pessimists just don't do that sort of thing."On Band Aid "One can have great concern for the people of Ethiopia, but it's another thing to inflict daily torture on the people of England"
"I always thought my genitals were the result of some crude practical joke."
"If you cannot impress people simply by being part of the great fat human race, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you don't impress people by the way you look, then you really do have to develop other skills. And if you are now going to ask is everything I did just a way to gain some form of attention, well that's not entirely true. It is in a small way, but that's in the very nature of being alive.""Wanting to be loved?"
"To be seen, above all else. I wanted to be noticed, and the way I lived and do live has a desperate neurosis about it because of that. All humans need a degree of attention. Some people get it at the right time, when they are 13 or 14, people get loved at the right stages. If this doesn't happen, if the love isn't there, you can quite easily just fade away. ... In a sense I always felt that being troubled as a teenager was par for the course. I wasn't sure that I was dramatically unique. I knew other people who were at the time desperate and suicidal. They despised life and detested all other living people. In a way that made me feel a little bit secure. Because I thought, well, maybe I'm not so intense after all. Of course, I was. I despised practically everything about human life, which does limit one's weekend activities."
“I don’t know if I even exist off stage.”(On what annoys him about himself) "Practically everything. I miss not being able to stand up straight. I tend to slide into rooms and sit on the chair behind the door."
“I lost myself to music at a very early age, and I remained there.”
" Well, the problem I've had with all the interviews I've had in America - I had meetings with about nine labels - and they all say to me "Will your new songs fit in with what is popular and what is in the chart?" And I say "Good God, I hope not!" ""What do you feel about erotic art?"
"I don't know much about rotting art?"
"What about erotic music?"
"I know a great deal about rotting music."
"I'm bereft of spiritual solutions. I do believe that there has to be a better world, but that's rather simple. I'm quite obsessed with death. I've gone through periods of intense envy for people who've died. Yes, I have a dramatic unswayable unavoidable obsession with death. I can remember being obsessed with it from the age of eight and I often wondered whether it was quite a natural inbuilt emotion for people who're destined to take their own lives, that they recognise it and begin to study it. If there was a magical beautiful pill that one could take that would retire you from this world, I think I would take it and I suppose that's the extremity of the obsessiveness."
"It's the nicest birthday I've ever had. You've made a happy man very old. "
"I thank you from the heart of my bottom."And, just to summarise:
"I say a lot of things I don’t mean."
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