John Ashbery Quotes

I think I'm always trying to subvert conventions, and sometimes it's more successful than others.

I don't care about the rules. In fact, if I don't break the rules at least 10 times in every song then I'm not doing my job properly.

I wanted to go so I could learn the rules and conventions in order to break them later on.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.

Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.

A new medium always has a period when it is struggling inside the confining box of an earlier medium. Creators have to unlearn what they knew before they can see the fresh, uncharted vistas stretching before them.

I don't want to just be in the normal kind of teen movie.

Original thought, original artistic expression is by its very nature questioning, irreverent, iconoclastic.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

Good taste is death; vulgarity is life.

When I brought 'Sex and the City' to HBO, I wanted to do something independent, where I could be like, 'I don't care if anybody watches this thing. Just let me do something that I would love to see.' Honestly, the success of 'Sex and the City' was what was most surprising to me. It was sort of like the anti-TV-show in my mind.

I kept hearing all these rules: 'You can't say that in country music.' 'You can't use that kind of beat.' I became so frustrated. It may have slingshotted me, in a rebellious way, toward doing something different.

I'm a complete deviant. All creative work breaks new ground.

I'm not trying to obey the rules of radio.

You should live hoping you are going to offend people, because then you're doing something.

Punk was such an exciting time because there were no rules. You could go and knock on Sun Ra's door - and he was in the phonebook, under Ra!

Bohemia isn't somewhere an artist runs to escape society. It's a place where like-minded artists gather to plot the downfall of dogma and ignorance.

We're a band that's never been okay with the status quo. In a way, it's allowed us to be more open and confrontational in our music.

It takes someone like Ram Gopal Varma to change the norms, bend the rules, shake convention, and come up with something like 'Road.'

I do like artfully breaking rules.

An artist is always out of step with the time. He has to be.

I never learned the rules in the first place. To change the game is at the heart of what Virgin stands for, so the company culture has always been: "Don't sweat it: rules were meant to be broken."

Sure, I can talk like you, but I choose not to, It's like an art, you know? Picasso had to prove to the world he could paint the right way, before he goes putting both eyes on the side of a face... See if you paint wrong because that's the best you can do, you just a chump. But you do it because you want to? Then you're an artist...You can take that to the grave and dig it up when you need it.

All art is based on non-conformity.