Lydia Lunch Quotes

Living in Barcelona, I have my own little ghetto utopia. There are 3,000 ghost towns in Spain, and I've used the images of them a lot in my backdrops for my solo spoken-word stuff. The ghost towns could be from two buildings to 40 - things died out, or there were plagues, the roads don't lead there, whatever.

The need to document my insanity is an affliction I have not yet cured myself of ...

I'm nihilistic, antagonistic, violent, horrible - but not obliterated, yet. I just refuse to be beaten down. I think it's stubborness that keeps me going.

If what I write is literature, I guess you'd better emphasize the 'litter.'

You want positive, go elsewhere. Go find a different lie.

The imperial, genocidal war machine never rests, so I don't either.

And is death not the ultimate orgasm, a return to that otherworldly ether, whose very origins were indeed a Big Bang, the ultimate explosion, the supreme chaos, whose resonance is the vibration we constantly seek to reproduce in everything we do.

If someone says 'grunge' or 'punk,' you know what the sound is, but if you say 'No Wave,' it's kind of mysterious. That was the most interesting part and should have been the most inspirational thing about it ... here's this collective sonic insanity, and none of it sounds anything alike.

I think it's important to encourage gluttony in all its formats.

Two of my favourite books are Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer' and 'Tropic of Capricorn.'

I just prefer instrumental. I don't need to hear what other people are singing. And if I need music as a backdrop to work or to think, I need to have that part of the brain clear - I don't need people feeding their fantasies into my vision.

I knew that my trauma, no matter what it was, was not unique. I knew that pain was the universal driving force of so many people - I knew that only in the details was it specific, and I just found it urgent to cut right to the chase and get right to the point.

People have always asked me, 'Haven't you wanted to sell out?', and it's like, who am I going to sell to?

I would be humiliated if I found out that anything I did actually became a commercial success.

I'm a very sympathetic person, but that doesn't always come across in my work because I'm too busy being mad at everything.

I am a humanist not a feminist. There's a big difference.

If people could understand how much pleasure they could have by themselves, I think everyone would be a lot saner. I think that people really need a dose of quality time with one's self.

Sure you're powerless, sure you're just one person, sure you can't change anything ... but you don't have to be miserable about it as well.

I'm separated by other performers with whom I might be lumped, since what I say is so intensely personal. I'm anti-art and anti-poetry. As much as possible, I want to inflict my personal pain on the rest of society.

Politics are always involved, even in my love songs.

The biggest insult is that I've been called an exaggerator ... I tell the truth as I know it. I don't glamorize the nightmare and horror that I witness; I just digest it and spew it back, with venom.

Honesty works against you in the entertainment field. I try to be a journalist and a documentarian, but that doesn't mean that people are going to embrace it at the moment. The point is I'm leaving the mark of my hysteria and the political hysteria, and that's it ... I can only do what I do.

I decided to lock myself in. A forced segregation. Sabbatical. A retreat into myself. My selves. Play hide and go seek in the looking-glass. The mirror angled at the foot of my bed. Twisted reflections bouncing off into infinity. Obsessed with my image, the myriad of distored figurines who danced in front of me in rapid succession, every feature exaggerated, every slight imperfection a new delicacy.

I've always been inspired by Genet, Henry Miller and Hubert Selby, Jr., who taught me that you've got to tell a bigger truth in whatever you're doing, but the truth is not popular.

I watch the news. It fuels my rage; it informs my work.

My job is to confront apathy and confront all the forces that tend to batter each of us down with all kind of oppression, even self-oppression. I consider that the main job of the art that I do- to rattle the cage, wake people up, wake myself up, confront all that would conspire to keep us down.

No easy way out. No escape. From yourself. You had to LEARN to DEAL with the cards you were dealt. Had to learn the hard way that the world doesn't OWE you a fucking thing. Not a reason, nor excuse. No apologies. Had to learn that some forms of insanity run in the family, pure genetics, polluted lifelines, full of disease. Profanity. Addiction. Co-addiction. Inability to deal with reality, what the fuck ever that's suppose to mean when you're born into an emotional ghetto of endless abuse. Where the only way out is in...deep, deep inside, so you poke holes in your skin, thinking that if you could just concentrate the pain it wouldn't remain an all-consuming surround which suffocates you from the first breath of day to your last dying day. Day in. Day out. Day in. Day out. I knew all about it.

And I feared that death picks up where life left off. An endless barrage of unbearable obstacles. A godforsaken terrain where lost souls find even less mercy. A shattered dreamstate where every somnambulant second is plagued by the nightmarish preoccupation of one's own fears. A bleak panorama where not even death offers any release, for what you wrought will come back to haunt. As if the struggle never ends. As if there is not now, nor ever has been peace. Peace being foreign to my nature. The nature of the fucking beast.

Because we have so much eye candy and mind candy, spending so much time trying to pay the rent, all of this conspires to keep us from thinking too hard or taking action from that. Our time is stolen. So much of our daily life is stolen.

The American way of life, as I see it, is really the American way of death. Everything is determined by greed and the insatiable desire to be the richest and most powerful. And that desire is limitless.

I think my speeches are hilarious. I think I'm a natural comedian, but I like denying people the chance to laugh. I want to deny you the relief of the punchline.

I'm like a one-woman protest machine.

To be in a band, at least according to the rules of rock in the 1970s, one must know how to play an instrument. But rather than waste time solving that problem, No Wavers ignored it. The point was simply to make music, not to learn how first.

I believe happiness is a chemical imbalance - it's a silly thing to strife for. But satisfaction - if you seek satisfaction, you can succeed. Satisfaction is knowing that you're doing the best that you can do; you're living your life to the fullest.

I had to de-program myself. From myself. Had to reinvent rituals of purification. So full of the vagrant pollutions of others. It was time to detox. Not only from alcohol, sex, and drugs, but from needy leeches who looked to swab me with their sores. Detox from my own needy lechery. Had to locate the center wound and cauterize. Undo the original sin, the origin of my sickness ... Had to learn to replace Them, It, Want, Hurt, Anger, Sorrow, Loss, with Power, Healing, Wisdom, Fulfillment, Satisfaction.

The problem with music was always that the sound system often obliterated the words, and words, not music, have always been what I was about.