Creativity Quote by Lydia Lunch

Lydia Lunch doesn’t praise gluttony because she’s forgotten the cost; she praises it because she’s daring you to stop pretending you don’t pay it anyway. Coming from a musician who built a career on confrontation, “encourage gluttony” reads less like an indulgence manifesto and more like an attack on polite, rationed living: the kind that calls itself “taste” but functions as compliance. The line is funny in the way a provocation is funny - it exaggerates to expose the hypocrisy underneath.

The genius is in “in all its formats.” She’s not just talking about food. She’s dragging in consumption as lifestyle: sex, attention, substances, art, shopping, content. “Formats” is a slyly contemporary word, the language of media and packaging, suggesting that even excess comes pre-bundled and market-ready. If gluttony is everywhere, then moral panic about it starts to look selective: we shame appetites that are visible or coded as vulgar, while celebrating the appetites that make money and signal status.

Subtextually, Lunch is flipping the script on a culture that sells constant wanting and then scolds you for wanting too much. The “encourage” matters: it’s not a confession, it’s a demand - a refusal of restraint as virtue, especially when restraint is imposed on women, on outsiders, on anyone told to be smaller. In the late-20th-century downtown art lineage she comes from, excess isn’t a flaw; it’s a weapon against sanitization.