Explore Quotes by Sebastian Horsley

The problem with compassion is that it is not photogenic.

I do a lot of things for effect, which is not to say I am superficial, but that I know how to put ideas across.

I used to have about a hundred suits in my late twenties and early thirties when my stock was riding high and I was rich.

I consider myself to be very correct and proper: an upright citizen.

I don't talk, I quote. I can't help it. It's better to be quotable than honest.

I think you are born, and I think you die. I have a pragmatic nature, but I yearn to believe.

People who have a reputation for being evil are usually good.

I like to remind myself that every morning I'm making a choice to live.

[…] life is just the misery left between abortion and euthanasia […]

My one concession to American sensibilities was to remove my nail polish.

An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more. I have always been fascinated by blood. Pain can be vitalizing; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?

But really death seems the least awful thing that can happen to someone

It's better to be quotable than honest, I don't speak, I quote. I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet.

I have wanted only one thing to make me happy. That thing is everything.

I didn't want to tell Mother I worked as a journalist. She thought I was a prostitute. Locking yourself in a room and inventing characters and conversations which do not exit is no way for a grown man to behave.

One of the many troubles of growing older is that it gets progressively harder to find a famous historical figure who hadn't yet amounted to anything by the time he was your age.

The function of music is to release us from the boredom of existence.

Unhappiness lies in that gap between our talents and our expectations.

Self-pity is the most destructive of all narcotics.

The motivation of all artists is 'Look at me, Mum'.

I can count all the lovers I've had on one hand...if I'm holding a calculator.