Sebastian Horsley Quotes

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?

It's better to be quotable than honest, I don't speak, I quote. I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet.

I might be old, but I'm still desirable.

The problem I've got is that I really, really like drugs. I love everything about them. It is horrific being sober all the time-utterly awful.

It's really interesting because 50 years ago, if you didn't wear a hat everyone looked at you. It just proves that everything is fashion.

Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't, he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere-much more Calvinistic, more neurotic - it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.

People either hate me or dislike me - but I realized that people aren't against you, they are for themselves. We're all prejudiced in favor of ourselves.

Getting old is horrible, but it is interesting . . . one of the things I've realized is that growing old is compulsory, but growing up is optional.

I don't think I'm known for my gifts - I'm known for my gall. I don't want to be just a famous person - I'm too old.

The function of music is to release us from the boredom of existence.

The motivation of all artists is 'Look at me, Mum'.

People are obsessed by happiness, but there are a lot of other invigorating experiences available.

You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things all a man's endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach. The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic. I have reached a nirvana of negativity. I can look futility in the face and still see promise in the stars.

We build our character as a carapace to keep away the fear of the abyss. That's what our character is for.

A woman is supposed to have curves like an old Bentley, not like some old bike.

I didn't want to tell Mother I worked as a journalist. She thought I was a prostitute. Locking yourself in a room and inventing characters and conversations which do not exit is no way for a grown man to behave.

Self-pity is the most destructive of all narcotics.

My only criticism about Quentin Crisp is that the subversive must be ready to subvert themselves. I may dress for myself, but I undress for everybody else, whereas he never did that - he was never prepared to drop a bomb on everything he did.

My one concession to American sensibilities was to remove my nail polish.

But really death seems the least awful thing that can happen to someone

If I hear that people are litigious, I immediately dismiss them.

Being well-dressed gives a feeling of inward tranquility which psychoanalysis is powerless to bestow.

[…] life is just the misery left between abortion and euthanasia […]

I am half-Byronic, half-moronic; part-shaman, part-showman; half-Nazi, half-Liberace.

There's a lot of noise about me that stops a lot of people from listening, but the good side is if you expose yourself like that, you're left with only good people who can see through you-you get rid of all the wankers.

To be worthy of assassination takes more than some crappy little book.

I like fat girls. A woman can never be too poor or too fat. I'd take a poor fat girl over a rich thin girl like Kate Moss.

I can count all the lovers I've had on one hand...if I'm holding a calculator.

One of the many troubles of growing older is that it gets progressively harder to find a famous historical figure who hadn't yet amounted to anything by the time he was your age.

I am desperate for attention. But everyone else is too. Everyone has fantasies of fame and greatness. Life for most people is a process of shedding those fantasies.

I keep the shutters closed because I like to work in a hermetic environment. I like mirrors. When you look out of the window, all you see is ugliness, but when you look in the mirror all you see is beauty.

I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say 'pass the mustard'.

Unhappiness lies in that gap between our talents and our expectations.

I don't really know what Americans are like. I've no idea. I know a few things about them. In my imagination, they have warm peachy hearts, whereas the English have horrible spiteful withered hearts - success in England inspires envy - in America, it inspires hope.

I have wanted only one thing to make me happy. That thing is everything.