I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

I find old copies of National Gallery catalogues, which are written in the dryest possible prose, infinitely soothing.

In England, it's thought to be morally suspect to worry about what your surroundings look like.

I look at my pictures, and I think, 'Well, how did I do that?'

I don't think you can lightly paint a picture. It's an activity I take very seriously.

I fell through a crack for years. Historically, I am a nothing because I fit in no category. I can only be me.

Collecting has been my great extravagance. It's a way of being. I collect for the same reason that I eat too much-I'm one of nature's shoppers.

My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.

When I finish a painting, it usually looks as surprising to me as to anyone else.

I think that words are often extraneous to what I do.

I once was interviewed and got so exasperated that I said, 'What do you want, a shopping list?' They kept asking, 'What's in this picture?'

Matisse was very clear about saying that you have to blow your own trumpet and explain yourself, which I think has been slightly forgotten.

I'm vulnerable to criticism. Any artist is, because you work alone in your studio and, until recently, critics were the only way you'd get any feedback.

A painting is finished when the subject comes back, when what has caused the painting to be made comes back as an object.

I'm very envious of the few artists who are any good and still do portraits.

I want my pictures to be things. I want them to be made up of marks that are physically and individually self-sufficient.

I think words come between the spectator and the picture.

The picture surface recedes just as much in the 20th century as it did in the 15th. The techniques of making pictures have hardly changed.

A collection makes its own demands. Many artists have been collectors. I think of it rather as an illness. I felt it was using up too much energy.

I hate painting.

I don't look at the work of my contemporaries very much; I tend to look at pictures by dead artists. It's much easier to get near their paintings.

You keep on balancing and balancing and balancing until the picture wins, because then the subject's turned into the picture.

In the United States there has been a kind of a structure in the Modern art world. The New York School was nearly a coherent thing-for a minute.

I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.

My language is what I use, and if I lost that, I wouldn't be able to say anything.

I am isolated as an artist, not as a person.

But I found a lot of artists at the Cedar Bar were difficult for me to talk to.

Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will-whatever we may think.

I got to sit down with people who I admired, and have conversations with some of the greatest thinkers and artists and performers. It's a huge privilege for me to be a journalist.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

David Cronenberg knows what we actors do as artists.

The truth is, we haven't really figured out yet how artists are going to thrive in modern mass societies. We're all experiments.

Many of the artists who have represented Negro life have seen only the comic, ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.

A great thing happening now in art is that artists are using the figure, the body, clothing, life.

The number of contemporary artists who appeal to me is infinitesimal.

I have to plead basic ignorance of most new jazz artists here.

Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.

Because when the film was first mooted, the Beatles didn't like the idea at all. In fact they wouldn't have any part in it. And when Brian had committed them, it was part of a deal he did with United Artists, I think.

Artists are like everybody else.

When artists make art, they shouldn't question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

My proudest achievement has been the success of the shows and artists I have been involved with, because they were made in Britain.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

I didn't want to save art - I respected the older artists too much to think art needed saving. But I knew it was finished, even though, at that time, I didn't know what I would do.

Music is more emotional than prose, more revolutionary than poetry. I'm not saying I've got the answers, just a of questions that I don't hear other artists asking.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.

I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since I was a kid, it's been of interest to me.

Let's look at people as artists and try to support them; just because Picasso painted a couple of bad paintings, that's no reason to say he's a lousy painter.