Laurie Simmons

Oh god, success is so exhausting.

— Laurie Simmons

I always say I'm an artist with the soul of a realtor.

— Laurie Simmons

I've always gone for a kind of perfection.

— Laurie Simmons

My career has been a slow burn with many peaks and valleys.

— Laurie Simmons

I can't even relate to the idea of raising a feminist.

— Laurie Simmons

You mine your own past in order to get to know yourself.

— Laurie Simmons

I think making features has got to be in the addiction category.

— Laurie Simmons

Who knew that being an artist was a glamour job?

— Laurie Simmons

Any work that is really great hovers between terrific and terrible.

— Laurie Simmons

My father was a dentist. And my mother was a - do we still say 'housewife'? A home engineer.

— Laurie Simmons

I think the big news there - most post-menopausal women I know are not celibate.

— Laurie Simmons

It's funny: when you're an artist, your own work goes in and out of fashion with you.

— Laurie Simmons

I never could have predicted that I would have done something that could be called portraiture.

— Laurie Simmons

I don't like touching things that are the curatorial flavor of the month.

— Laurie Simmons

My favourite thing is to discover what someone does well and say, 'Do that for me.'

— Laurie Simmons

I'm innately conservative, and painting is an ideal place to exercise a progressive conservatism. I operate well within limits.

— Laurie Simmons

I thought my father was biggest, tallest, smartest, handsomest man in the world, so if he was telling me something, I was…

— Laurie Simmons

We don't have real hours and we don't have a boss, so artists create rules for themselves that they then break. It's…

— Laurie Simmons

I think I'm still, in many ways, a terribly self-conscious person. I'd probably be shooting and think, "Well, how does my hair…

— Laurie Simmons

There's part of our culture where uniqueness is celebrated and appreciated and another part of our culture where this one way to…

— Laurie Simmons

The thing I wondered about so much as a young artist, particularly when things weren't going well and I was really struggling,…

— Laurie Simmons

I always try so hard to find a male doll and shoot a male doll, and it always kind of implodes. Whenever…

— Laurie Simmons

From the time I started taking photographs, I started working with plastics. I've always treated plastic like it was marble or gemstone…

— Laurie Simmons

Your ringtone is so personal to you, but the fact is millions of other people have your ringtone. I really love that…

— Laurie Simmons

The challenge has always been to wrest emotion out of a [doll's] face that we think of as only having one emotion.…

— Laurie Simmons

When you're getting ready, you finally reach a point where your clothes are right and your hair and makeup are right, and…

— Laurie Simmons

I do remember at my very first opening in 1979 another artist coming up to me, and he was haranguing me, saying,…

— Laurie Simmons

I use people that are close to me, like a studio assistant or a friend, someone I know who's going to really…

— Laurie Simmons

Here were also moments of, you know, you have an exhibition: no sale, no reviews. It's hard not to get blue, and…

— Laurie Simmons

I realized early on that artifice attracted me to an image more than any other quality - I mean artifice in the…

— Laurie Simmons

I teach a graduate photo seminar at Yale, and I sometimes feel so overwhelmed by the task the students set before themselves…

— Laurie Simmons

When I first came to New York, in the '70s, artists were certainly divided about the Andy Warhol persona, and about the…

— Laurie Simmons

The visual world has blown up, the world of writing has blown up; there's so much text online. Anyone and everyone can…

— Laurie Simmons

I'm way more influenced by my children than I was by my parents.

— Laurie Simmons

I'm not interested in telling a story in my photographic work. I'm more interested in freezing certain moments in time.

— Laurie Simmons

I've always written about other artists, or I write my thoughts down, but I've never written a story.

— Laurie Simmons

I was aware that people thought a certain type of photo work was either stealing, borrowing, copying or dumb.

— Laurie Simmons

People are much more willing nowadays to believe that pictures lie than [that] they can express any kind of truth.

— Laurie Simmons

Parenthetically, I have to say, I don't particularly like dolls, nor have I ever liked them.

— Laurie Simmons

I feel like an artist often turns the camera on themselves and on their own families to understand who they are.

— Laurie Simmons