Every writer from Montaigne to William S. Burroughs has pasted and cut from previous work. Every artist, whether it's Warhol or, you know, Dangermouse or whoever.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Burroughs called his greatest novel 'Naked Lunch,' by which he meant it's what you see on the end of a fork. Telling the truth. It's very difficult to do that in fiction because the whole process of writing fiction is a process of sidestepping the truth. I think he got very close to it, in his way, and I hope I've done the same in mine.
I think that an artist is a bit like a computer. He receives information from the world around him and from his past and from his own experiences. And it all goes into the brain.
You know, one of the only times I ever wrote about art was the obituary of Warhol that I did for the Village Voice.
I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.
Graffiti writers were the most interesting people in hip hop. They were the mad scientists, the mad geniuses, the weird ones.
The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.
An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.
When I got back to Madison Avenue, I realized that copywriters made more than artists, so I switched.
Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.
Good artists copy, great artists steal.