We are actually living in a million parallel realities every single minute.
The world doesn't need an artist who shows reality as it is.
Your ego can become an obstacle to your work. If you start believing in your greatness, it is the death of your creativity.
Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.
People put so much effort into starting a relationship and so little effort into ending one.
I hate studio. For me, studio is a trap to overproduce and repeat yourself. It is a habit that leads to art pollution.
I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long.
I prepare a lot. For 'The Artist Is Present,' it took me a year to teach my body not to produce acids.
When people ask me where I am from I never say, 'Serbia.' I always say, 'I come from a country that no longer exists.'
We always project into the future or reflect in the past, but we are so little in the present.
I hate studios. A studio is a black hole. I never use a studio to work. It's very artificial to go to a studio to get new ideas. You have to get new ideas from life, not from the studio. Then you go to the studio to realize the idea.
My mother and father were partisan national heroes: I learned sacrifice and discipline from them and that a private life is not as important as the message you want to leave.
The only time I really feel tired and old is when I look back; I always like to look just in the front of me. I'll always feel like I didn't finish enough, such a short time is left, and there's still so much to do.
I've been criticized by my generation, artists from the '70s - and there's nothing more tragic than artists from the '70s still doing art from the '70s - because I blur all these borders between fashion and pop.
There are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men.
From a very early time, I understood that I only learn from things I don't like.
You know how you feel somebody looking at you, and you turn, and somebody actually is? It's the same at an art gallery. You're looking at one portrait, turn around, and there is a work of art directly behind you. Because it's all energy. Every single thing has energy.
When Lady Gaga says I am her inspiration, you reach kids between 12 and 18. Now I am like a brand - jeans, Coca-Cola.
I can explain my work to the cleaner or the president; it's all the same to me. I am very communist in this way.
If I'm not nervous, I'm nervous. You never know how people are going to receive the work.
With classical ballet you are literally injuring yourself.
To really change the way society thinks, you have to give your entire being to it until there's nothing left.
I had a very difficult relationship with my mother. She used to wake me up in the middle of the night if I wasn't sleeping straight and was messing up the sheets. Now when I stay in hotels I sleep so straight they don't even think I've used the bed.
I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris.
Being an artist is not easy - I have always said that to the students I have taught over the years. It's a huge sacrifice.
In every ancient culture, there are rituals to mortify the body as a way of understanding that the energy of the soul is indestructible.
