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My favourite things are jokes, friendliness and feeling comfortable.

Billy Childish

Before 1999, Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas offered to get me exhibitions, but joining the Stuckists put a kaibosh on all that – because I wasn’t prepared to be controlled.
BILLY CHILDISH

Exhibition Joining Want
I don’t spend a lot of time working if I can help it.
BILLY CHILDISH

Helping Time Working
Failure is fantastic, because you meet yourself and get to know your limitations. This is how I express myself, and I can’t do it any other way.
BILLY CHILDISH

Fantastic Knows Way
I gave up drinking lots of whiskey and began to practice yoga and meditation. As a result I am not dead.
BILLY CHILDISH

Drinking Health Yoga
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.
BILLY CHILDISH

Cars Looks People Shouting
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.
BILLY CHILDISH

Challenging Heroes Late Resistance Schnauzers Seen Witness
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.
BILLY CHILDISH

Campaign Cd Jukeboxes Play Silence
I liked drawing and painting, because the only failure would be to listen to the doubters who wanted me to stop drawing and painting because ‘you aren’t going to make a living doing that.’ I liked looking in art books at the work of painters.
BILLY CHILDISH

Art Book Drawing
I did not like prizes at school. I didn’t like tests or exams, or the 11+, or O-levels. Later I hated B.A.s and M.A.s. The reason I hated them is that I don’t like being tested, failed or falsely praised by anyone.
BILLY CHILDISH

Levels Reason School Tests
I like being on the margins. You work better there.
BILLY CHILDISH

Better Margins Work
My favourite things are jokes, friendliness and feeling comfortable.
BILLY CHILDISH

Favourite Feelings Jokes
I think that the mythology of Van Gogh’s life, and the beauty of his paintings, is unstoppable.
BILLY CHILDISH

Painting Thinking Unstoppable
I’ve not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I’ll listen to ‘Spiral Scratch’ by the Buzzcocks, or ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.
BILLY CHILDISH

Blue Hippy Punk Rocks Since Years
I loved moustaches. I used to draw myself with one. When I was 14, I was really into war and Van Gogh.
BILLY CHILDISH

Moustache Used War
One of my biggest problems in life has been my inability to lie.
BILLY CHILDISH

Inability Lying Problem
We had the same kind of unemployment here as they had in the worst hit places in the North and you’re meant to be on a cushy wicket in the South.
BILLY CHILDISH

Squares Towns Unemployment

My favourite things are jokes, friendliness and feeling comfortable.

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My favourite things are jokes, friendliness and feeling comfortable.

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