Top 55 Genesis P-Orridge Quotes

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.

England was very frustrating in the Seventies for anyone who was trying to wake up. It was visible in punk, in clothes, and in the revival of mods and rockers fighting. All kinds of things were going on that just weren’t individual to myself.

To be an ‘artist’ is as much a calling from and to a divine service as becoming a physician, nurse, priest, shaman, or healer.

Me and Lady Jaye hung out with Anita Pallenberg a few times in the house she lived in with Brian Jones.

The status quo is presented as something to aspire to, whereas for us, the status quo was something we wanted to shatter in order to create the space for people to choose for themselves.

Once you have a hit, it just becomes another old song.

Imagination should always be treasured, even when it’s slightly off-key.

We don’t agree with Caitlyn Jenner deciding she is the spokesperson for trans people.

All the people at university were very aristocratic – except me, because I was on scholarship. And everyone there voluntarily wore suits and ties every day. And this was in the ’60s!

You have an absolute right to translate poetry in any form with any sound. It’s all up for grabs.

Mick Jagger is 70 and still singing ‘Satisfaction’ every concert. That would drive me insane.

Everything in our world tends to be built on either/ors, and either/ors inevitably make enemies.

People have become obsessed with the greed of celebrity and self-branding and wanting to be known and recognized and succeed in some way, and they’re not prepared to share and help each other.

Things don’t happen in a vacuum, and artists don’t make work in a vacuum.

My father gave me a copy of ‘Seven Years in Tibet,’ and that’s what turned me on to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.

We should always be looking for the unity in things instead of the differences.

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.’

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!

Within TG, we liberated the use of the lyric forever. There was no longer a taboo on what could be discussed in the conceptual format of a song.

There’s always a way to say something that could seem really commonplace and make it special again.

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.

All culture, all important culture, is always linked to how people express and experience being alive.

I would experiment with porridge – make porridge pancakes, fry porridge – and so friends started calling me ‘Porridge.’ But I got to feel that I was becoming a character, a work of fiction, in a sense.

I am so sick and tired of being told what I’m supposed to look like!

There’s a moment for everybody when you look at that picture of Jesus in the church and think, ‘This doesn’t totally make sense.’ If God made everything, then who made God? We have no idea.

Life and art are inseparable.

I think one of the gorgeous things about TG is that we will go from something amazingly serious and important and significant in terms of the world and life, and then do something ludicrous and absurd.

I’ve discovered the joys of happiness.

My artwork is in order to seduce people into thinking.

Brian Jones had this really ethereal atmosphere around him.

Once you believe things are permanent, you’re trapped in a world without doors.

Girls together getting dressed up can be really good fun.

I met William Burroughs in 1971. I got his address through a magazine and went to London to spend time with him.

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.

Humans have to realise they’re not individuals but individual parts of the same organism, with responsibility to each other.

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 guess I’m dedicated to breaking every inherited mould I can in my private life.

In the old days, maybe we’d come across Captain Beefheart, buy a record, go, ‘This is great!’ and notice how his music is evolving, changing, and becoming more complex, more radical. And we would follow that progression and see it reflected in the alternative culture it came from.

I’ve had all my teeth replaced with solid gold replicas of the originals.

A lot of the conceptualists and the prestige galleries are debasing themselves in presentations which have little else to them but the presentation.

Curiosity is a great weapon for the artist.

Change is not a linear process; it’s an all-encompassing process, and it’s alive in different ways.

When the blues came out, it was something pure and undefined, but when all these white groups got hold of it, it became something else that didn’t sound anything like the original. So you had Led Zeppelin doing their thing, which had come all the way from the blues.

Writing is a recording that you can cut up and reassemble. Sound is something you can cut up and reassemble. Film, video – you know, the main tools of culture – can all be cut up and reassembled.

Haircuts are luxuries and, as such, should be as expensive as you can possibly afford.

When Lady Gaga wears a meat dress, it’s meant to be controversial, but then it turns into money, and it’s all fine.

As a little boy, I never felt comfortable with being human.

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.

Pleasure is a cultural weapon. Use it wisely.

I believe in being completely open to the most unlikely explanation.

Humanity is a virus.

My mind jumbles things, reassembles them, and plays with words without even being asked.

Lady Jaye and I always thought black eyes were really sexy.

Celebrity haircuts are one of the great perks of even a little media profile.

There is no distinction between reverence for existence and our senses and/or apathy.