Somebody once asked me, 'What do you do?' and I flippantly answered 'I'm a cultural engineer.' With hindsight, I kind of am - but if I got too self-conscious about it, it wouldn't work.
— Genesis P-Orridge
The great irony was that, while I was being portrayed as a monster, I was in Khatmandu with my children, doing soup kitchens for Tibetan refugees, using all the money from my records to feed three hundred people a day, and working with monks connected to the Sammye Ling Buddhist centre in Scotland.
I believe in being completely open to the most unlikely explanation.
It turns out that there's a huge community of African-American musicians whose main influence is Throbbing Gristle.
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.
Everyone is telling the truth all of the time... well, it's just that times change.
You have an absolute right to translate poetry in any form with any sound. It's all up for grabs.
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.
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's always a way to say something that could seem really commonplace and make it special again.
Humanity is a virus.
A real New Yorker is always someone who came here from somewhere else to avoid some kind of persecution, often sexual-preference based, or to be discovered in one of the infinite-though-no-longer-thriving alternative scenes, i.e. theater, music, dance, vaudeville, art, drag, or, in those of the greatest egos, to be 'the next Andy Warhol.'
We live in this miraculous technological environment, and yet our human behaviour is still governed by basic impulses from prehistoric times.
I really feel that I've been unjustly exorcised from the story of psychedelic music.
I'm not a man trapped in a woman's body. I'm a brain trapped in a human body.
'Star Trek' works for me because it deals with the petty issues of humankind.
In the art world, sentimentality and intimacy and the emotive side of lives are considered very uncool. There's nervousness around intimacy.
I think we can only ultimately change the world by example and by fearlessly embracing what could happen.
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.
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.
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.
We should always be looking for the unity in things instead of the differences.
When in doubt, make no sense. No sense is good. And nonsense is good.
Imagination should always be treasured, even when it's slightly off-key.
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.
My father gave me a copy of 'Seven Years in Tibet,' and that's what turned me on to Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism.
With Thobbing Gristle, that era from '75 to '81 was a period when the politics of the time demanded anger and rage.
Everyone knows that when things are out of balance, things go wrong.
Celebrity haircuts are one of the great perks of even a little media profile.
The body is simply the suitcase that carries us around.
I've always felt that all the music I've made is psychedelic, including Throbbing Gristle.
There is no distinction between reverence for existence and our senses and/or apathy.
Life and art are inseparable.
Me and Lady Jaye hung out with Anita Pallenberg a few times in the house she lived in with Brian Jones.
I've always aimed to create something pure.
I've discovered the joys of happiness.
A band can be so much more than just a way to play songs.
We've always said Psychic TV's music is the sum total of who's in it at the time.
I guess I'm dedicated to breaking every inherited mould I can in my private life.
I am so sick and tired of being told what I'm supposed to look like!
Curiosity is a great weapon for the artist.
Things don't happen in a vacuum, and artists don't make work in a vacuum.
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.'
I was born in Manchester, England.
My mind jumbles things, reassembles them, and plays with words without even being asked.
Haircuts are luxuries and, as such, should be as expensive as you can possibly afford.
I've had all my teeth replaced with solid gold replicas of the originals.
I was very good friends with Ian Curtis from Joy Division. In fact, I was the last person he spoke with before he died.
Pleasure is a cultural weapon. Use it wisely.
All the great artists illustrate their approach to life in the work they make.
