David Shields Quotes

My philosophy through all my work, be it on canvas or on the street, is about pushing boundaries and not going with the flow because everyone else is doing something a certain way.

The Pre-Raphaelites, while very bothered by what the establishment thought of them, also utterly rebelled against it. In everything - social, sexual, emotional - they were out on a limb, pushing the boundaries.

Being an artist is in part an act of rupture.

I love challenging the status quo.

To be able to create fully, it's maybe fine that you learn the rules, but you have to forget and to rebel against those rules.

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

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.

The only possible effect one can have on the world is through unpopular ideas.

I went to grad school because I wanted to learn the rules so I would know how to break them. Breaking the rules is saying, 'I'm breaking in, OK? I'm breaking in your very comfortable little house over here, and I'm going to take a room.'

I feel my role is to push boundaries. I don't like things to be safe and sedentary. So controversy is the cross I have to bear.

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

It is an artist's duty to be on the wrong end of the see-saw.

Isn't art about breaking rules, about challenging existing systems, isn't it about discovering meaning in things or situations before others see anything in them??

You know that scenario where roses are red, leaves are green, I love arguing that. ‘Why should they be?’. I hate rules and formulas. That’s so boring. It’s the opposite of creativity. Rules are ridiculous things that are meant to be broken.

I think sometimes bad behaviour can be liberating for certain people. They need to behave badly to find themselves - to go off path to find their path. You see it with kids all the time: They're testing boundaries, and I think that's healthy.

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

You don't know what the country is ready for unless you're pushing that envelope, and I was told that I couldn't develop 'Will and Grace'.

A lot of singers find a musical genre people like and stick with it. That's being a conformist. I sing ballads, rock, salsa, rap.

Everyone's got skeletons in their closet, and I've got a million in mine, believe me. I tested the envelope; I pushed it. Whenever somebody in authority told me not to do something, I did it just to find out why they said not to do it.

I like pushing boundaries.

From an early age I didn't buy into the value systems of working hard in a nine-to-five job. I thought creativity, friendship and loyalty and pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable was much more interesting.

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

Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many.

I think I always have been someone who likes to push at the edges of things, looking for something different.