Grayson Perry

“I was very excited when the Holburne Museum proposed a show of my ceramics from the 80s and early 90s as it would also be an opportunity to find and record the beginnings of my career.”

“Since 1960s pop art the art world has been happy for artists to use the lowbrow to add zest and authenticity to their works. But middlebrow has resonances of the suburban bourgeousie who might see art as aspirational by association.”

“The best view is always from the mountain you've climbed.”

“I never held myself as a nice person for most of my life.”

“Drawing will never go out of date because, you know, you've still got to have the imaginative thought. You've got to react to the world in the present and do a drawing.”

“I haven't been to Oxbridge. I haven't even been to a London art school. My qualifications are pretty meagre for such a brief, but I just trust in my sense of what I'm interested in and my mission of clarity.”

“Self-consciousness is almost the biggest thing you have to deal with as an artist. That's why many artists crash and burn, because they can't handle the attention and the financial implications of every brushstroke.”

“I often hear women approvingly describe themselves or other women as feisty. Feisty, I feel, has sexist implications, as if standing up for yourself was exceptional in a woman. It sounds like a word that a raffish Lothario would use about a difficult conquest.”

“Im a maximalist, so Im probably not very elegant. My art is not a coup de grce. Its a war of attrition.”

“Pottery was what sandal-wearing, windchime-lovers did. Art is sensitive to areas of visual culture that havent yet been colonised by the art world, and perhaps what they sensed back then was, here was an area that hadnt been fully explored.”

“Well it's interesting because we use the word brand in a very derogatory way a lot of the time. I do it as much as anyone. But i think a brand is also sort of like momentum; it gets you through the bad patches if you've got a good brand.”

“When we talk of identity, we often think of groups such as black Muslim lesbians in wheelchairs. This is because identity only seems to become an issue when it is challenged or under threat.”

“I like skateboarding because it's backyard danger. You don't need to go on an alpine holiday to get thrills.”

“I'm suspicious when I go to someone's house and everything is beautiful and perfect. Authenticity often means mistakes.”

“Well, intellectual importance is directly linked to financial value in the art world. I mean, thats the thing you really want - museum quality. You want to go down in the annals of art history.”

“I enjoyed the thought that hovering behind my work is a unifying belief system, just as there is behind Egyptian or Ancient Greek art. It just happens that the person who thought up the belief system behind my work is still around - ie, me.”

“The preparations for my very first exhibition in 1984 consisted of banging a line of nails in roughly the right place and hanging plates on them. I don't think a tape measure or a spirit level was involved and the whole process took less time than the session in the pub afterwards.”

“Art is a process. Its expressing yourself and doing something, and throwing yourself into it and getting better at it and trying again. Thats what its about.”

“I think its dangerous when people think theyre being expressive. Yuck. Its like people who say theyre spiritual, innit. You make the work you want to make, and you get on with it and hopefully it connects with other people.”

“The male role is heavily policed from birth, by parents, peers and bosses. Politicians in particular are harshly kept in line by a media that seems to uphold more bizarrely rigid standards of conformity than those held by any citizen.”