“Just for the record, being smeared with shit and naked in the wilderness, spattered with pink vomit, this does not necessarily make you a real artist.”

“Just for the record, waking up on drugs with your pubic hair shaved and something plastic stuck in your vagina doesn't necessarily make you a real artist.”

“A record deal doesn't make you an artist; you make yourself an artist”

“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.”

“...hanging out does not make one an artist. A secondhand wardrobe does not make one an artist. Neither do a hair-trigger temper, melancholic nature, propensity for tears, hating your parents, nor even HIV - I hate to say it - none of these make one an artist. They can help, but just as being gay does not make one witty (you can suck a mile of cock, as my friend Sarah Thyre puts it, it still won't make you Oscar Wilde, believe me), the only thing that makes one an artist is making art. And that requires the precise opposite of hanging out; a deeply lonely and unglamorous task of tolerating oneself long enough to push something out.”

“Real artist cannot be blackmailed. I suspect they've been confessing shit all their life.”