Billy Childish Quotations

I don't spend a lot of time working if I can help it.

Bowie and McCartney arrived, and the biscuits and caviare started and I left immediately. I don't like shouting across rooms, with people in shiny suits who look like used-car salesmen.

When I was better known than her, she put my name in that tent. I was asked to do Celebrity Big Brother, but why should I? We live in an age where fame is not related to what you do.

Being a fan of authentic Dada, I find today's art - what I call 'Bankers' Dada' - mind-numbingly dull. The most challenging work I've seen of late is by The British Art Resistance. Their document, 'A Call for Heroes in an Age of Cowards', is apt in these days of witless chancers.

People could live very happily without the Turner Prize, but they could not live without real communication and emotion.

We are not actually in charge of life, yet we behave as if we are the masters of our own destiny. The realization of this fact is quite a hard one. The ridiculousness of our pomposity and presumption can only result in anger or humor.

I like being on the margins. You work better there.

I'm not trying to achieve perfection. I don't like this forced control people have over work.

I'm going to get a pair of wire-snips, and I've also started a new campaign to have blank CDs on jukeboxes so you can play the silence.

I think that the mythology of Van Gogh's life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable.