Top 66 Grayson Perry Quotes

We live in a media saturated world. I’m sure artists of the past would have dealt with it in just the same way. If you‘re in the business of communication and images, then if you ignore the media-sphere you’re just cutting off your own foot. It’s just daft.

When we talk of identity, we often think of groups such as black Muslim lesbians in wheelchairs. This is because identity only seems to become an issue when it is challenged or under threat.

I often hear women approvingly describe themselves or other women as feisty. Feisty, I feel, has sexist implications, as if standing up for yourself was exceptional in a woman. It sounds like a word that a raffish Lothario would use about a difficult conquest.

Im a fan of the restaurant where they only have one thing and maybe a vegetarian option. You get what you are given.

I realised that identity always seemed to be an issue when it was challenged – thats when it seemed to be most in 3D, so that you could look at it.

Success in the art world means getting invitations to exhibit in some great places. I had shown in contemporary art museums in Europe, America, New Zealand and Japan. I’d also been asked to curate shows, and had made work to go with my selections from historical collections.

If you act as if you love someone and care about them, then before long you do care and you do love them.

Gender is great, and Im happy for anybody to celebrate wherever they are on the gender spectrum. Its got amazingly much easier in my lifetime.

I love learning. I always learn on the job.

I enjoyed the thought that hovering behind my work is a unifying belief system, just as there is behind Egyptian or Ancient Greek art. It just happens that the person who thought up the belief system behind my work is still around – ie, me.

I tick so many boxes. Thats why I get a lot of gigs – because I can do the lectures, I can do the television thing, and I dress up, and by the way, Im an artist as well.

Im quite self-serving so, while going round a degree show, what I really want to find out is whats going on in the world today, particularly as technology has widened the chasm between generations.

One of the dangers of male emotionality is that theyre not aware of it churning away beneath them the whole time.

I dont care how Ill be remembered after death. For all I know people will put all my work in a skip the next day.

As human beings, we are addicted to novelty. Part of being stylish is surprisingness. Part of being an artist is surprisingness. If there are ingredients of beauty, it certainly is one of them. Surprise is like a spice on the meal, it makes you say: ‘woo‘.

My tapestries are woven on a computer-controlled loom. I design them on Photoshop. I recently did some digitally-routed woodcuts because I wanted the woodcut look, but I didn’t want to get the chisels out.

I was in therapy for six years and then stopped. You get hardwired at adolescence, like a caterpillar that pupates and re-assembles itself as an insect. It’s very hard to change after that.

I’ve got a pot in my studio that is just a bitter rant against the art world. I call it my Dorian Gray.

Art is a process. Its expressing yourself and doing something, and throwing yourself into it and getting better at it and trying again. Thats what its about.

Well it’s interesting because we use the word brand in a very derogatory way a lot of the time. I do it as much as anyone. But i think a brand is also sort of like momentum; it gets you through the bad patches if you’ve got a good brand.

Well, intellectual importance is directly linked to financial value in the art world. I mean, thats the thing you really want – museum quality. You want to go down in the annals of art history.

How art works is really interesting. It comes from our unconscious, a lot of it. And were communicating in ways were not completely aware of when were making it.

Self-consciousness is almost the biggest thing you have to deal with as an artist. That’s why many artists crash and burn, because they can’t handle the attention and the financial implications of every brushstroke.

My job is to make meaning. To make meaning in a meaningless world.

In the art world, originality is seen as a precious commodity and its increasingly difficult to get because the territory of art is so trampled.

I was very excited when the Holburne Museum proposed a show of my ceramics from the 80s and early 90s as it would also be an opportunity to find and record the beginnings of my career.

Road rage is my vice. Im a cyclist and motorcyclist, and people who dont indicate drive me nuts.

My father was a keen photographer; he had his own darkroom.

From birth until I went to art college when I was 19, there are perhaps less than a dozen photographs of me.

I’ve always gone out with women who made me laugh.

For me, earnestness is the greatest crime an Englishman can commit.

Well, within my business, visual art, the intake is 75 per cent female and yet you look at who has showed their work and I think there still is a dominance of males.

Often men dont even realise theyre sad. Boys are brought up to unconsciously feel they would be breaking their man contract if they were to cry too much.

I think Im addicted to periods of doubt and low confidence. I think you should worry if you dont have them because then youre not trying hard enough.

I like skateboarding because it’s backyard danger. You don’t need to go on an alpine holiday to get thrills.

I hate to tell this to people but most gods were invented by someone. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m in the present, whereas the famous gods were invented by someone a long time ago.

There are some very unsavoury aspects of art dealing that go with the unregulated nature of the market but its all part of the glamour. Glamour always has an unsavoury edge. I dont want to come across as preachy.

Of course, I worry about being fashionable, although when you’re fashionable you’re already on the track to being unfashionable.

I think that democracy has a lowest common denominator thing going on, so it might be the best of a bad bunch of political systems; but as a way of making art, actually, its not always that great, because it boils everything down.

I had an affair with an older woman when I was at college, and she was a strong feminist, which shaped my view of women. I learned that they could call the shots, which was fine with me.

Drawing will never go out of date because, you know, you’ve still got to have the imaginative thought. You’ve got to react to the world in the present and do a drawing.

The best view is always from the mountain you’ve climbed.

I’m suspicious when I go to someone’s house and everything is beautiful and perfect. Authenticity often means mistakes.

Nothing frustrates me about the art world. It is a lovely place. There are many daft things that amuse me about it though.

I did a psychotherapy day once, about class, and the first thing they did was get us to talk about our names. Of course, me, being called Grayson, everybody thinks its somehow unusual and classy. No, its bang-on aspirational working class.

And it’s been one of my big sort of campaigns throughout my career, really, is to sort of make art accessible but without dumbing it down. You know, art – the more you know about it, the more you enjoy it.

Im as masculine as the next man – get me on the mountain bike and Im vicious.

Im interested in those things that hover in our unconsciousnesses – class, gender, identity – until we have to think about them for whatever reason. So normal is whatevers normal for you, until its not.

I was sort of mute when I went to art school. There were two girls there who thought I was German because I only grunted.

The preparations for my very first exhibition in 1984 consisted of banging a line of nails in roughly the right place and hanging plates on them. I don’t think a tape measure or a spirit level was involved and the whole process took less time than the session in the pub afterwards.

If you had bought my work in 1983 you could have had it for next to nothing.

I think of colour sense as the visual equivalent of perfect pitch. Some people can just reach into a pile of swatches and say that looks nice with that.

The art world would have you believe that anything can be art. But, of course, there’s actually many things that aren’t art. And we would all recognize it when it isn’t.

I’ve always liked working with an archetypal design, something functional.

Fashion is a language, and therefore says something about politics, and certain fashion styles get associated with certain political standpoints.

I think people mistakenly get their chaos muddled up with their creativity. Provided you know what your issues are, they’re not going to go away.

I think sometimes in the art world theres an implication that you need an entry-level education to walk through the door of a gallery. But you dont. The learning experience actually happens once youre in the gallery.

As an artist I’m very aware of what I call Picasso-napkin syndrome – I’ve got this 20th century version of the midas touch, where if I do a little doodle it’s worth money!

Fashion is a way to orchestrate the spectacle of ideas. You can get someone who is fashionable but not terribly stylish, and the other way round.

I haven‘t been to Oxbridge. I haven’t even been to a London art school. My qualifications are pretty meagre for such a brief, but I just trust in my sense of what I’m interested in and my mission of clarity.

I always think that painters are fighting over the last original brushstroke. To find your own voice is incredibly hard.

We learned how to look at art from religion.

Maybe if they didnt tense up, always need to be competitive, always need to be in charge, always need to be the one at the top, men might find that there are benefits from releasing the grip of power.

Early on, my way of teasing the art world was by playing at being accessible. Like making pottery: I thought people would buy that for Christmas presents.

When mobile phones came out, they were a status symbol. Now the status symbol is having someone to manage your mobile phone for you.

Part of being an artist is that you are achingly self-conscious about every aesthetic decision you make, and taste is at its most powerful when it’s a default, unconscious decision because that’s when all the influence of your childhood and background and society comes into play.