Grayson Perry Quotes

You want someone in the ballpark and then you grow together. Thats what a relashionship's about: changing each other.

Art is not some fun add-on to life,

Until we can insert a USB into our ear and download our thoughts, drawing remains the best way of getting visual information on to the page. I draw as a collagist, juxtaposing images and styles of mark-making from many sources. The world I draw is the interior landscape of my personal obsessions and of cultures I have absorbed and adapted, from Latvian folk art to Japanese screens. I lasso thoughts with a pen. I draw a stave church or someone from Hello! Magazine not because I want to replicate how they look, but because of the meaning they bring to the work.

Men might need to work less on their biceps and more on their intuition.

The middle class male thinks he has a monopoly on objectivity.

Because I am a transvestite, people often assume that this gives me a special insight into the opposite gender. But this is rubbish: how can I, brought up as a man, know anything about the experience of being a woman? It would be insulting to women if I thought I did. If anything, it gives me a sharper insight into what it is to be a man, since from the age of twelve I have been questioning my own masculinity.

To appreciate art you've got to work at it a bit.

Fulfilment of masculinity is often sold on the strength of peak experiences: winning battles, pulling women, pure adrenaline, moments of ecstasy. But life ain't like that. We rarely, if ever, take our car (masculinity) on to a racetrack, so maybe we need a version that works doing the everyday things. We need a masculinity that's easy to park, with a big boot, child seats and low fuel consumption. Men need to learn to equip themselves for peace.

Examining masculinity can seem like a luxury problem, a pastime for a wealthy, well-educated, peaceful society, but I would argue the opposite: the poorer, the more undeveloped, the more uneducated a society is, the more masculinity needs realigning with the modern world, because masculinity is probably holding back that society. All over the globe, crimes are committed, wars are started, women are being held back, and economies are disastrously distorted by men, because of their outdated version of masculinity.

I think when we talk of craft we talk of a certain set of processes, whether that be clay of glass if jewelry or textiles, and we look back through history instantly.

Artists should imprint their handwriting on the work, because if they give a piece to a fabrication studio, the craftsmen there may actually be too perfect; you don't see the quirks that the artist would have developed.

Keith Tyson, a winner of the Turner Prize, did a piece once where he just got the things already in the gallery and made them into artworks with what he called his 'magical activation'. So he looked at the light switch and he called it 'the apocalyptic switch' and he looked at the light bulb and he called it 'the light bulb of awareness'. He was using his power as an artist to designate things art, but it was within the art context.

The rise of gyms, factories of cosmetic muscle, is partly down to an increased desire to sculpt an idealised body - a body not formed by experience, but to fulfil a well-marketed visual stereotype

I like the idea of my art being a covetable object; I like preciousness. A lot of art seems to flaunt its throw-away character ... But you have to sail out into the dangerous sea of fine art with these crafted works.

It's fine being terribly cynical and ironic when I'm out in the evening and I'm with my mates, but when I want to look at art, I want to have a sincere on-to-one experience with it because I'm a serious artist. I've dedicated my life to it. So I go to exhibitions in the morning on my own when I can go, "Hmm,' and maybe have a little bit of a moment. I have to protect my tender parts from that wicked irony.

Originality is for people with short memories