I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.

I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.

I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.

I start a picture and I finish it.

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

I wanted to be a star, not a gallery mascot.

Believe it or not, I can actually draw.

I thought I was going to be a bum the rest of my life.

Since I was seventeen I thought I might be a star. I'd think about all my heroes, Charlie Parker, Jimi Hendrix... I had a romantic feeling about how these people became famous.

I am not a black artist, I am an artist.

Charles Saatchi has never liked my work at all.

For a while, I was drawing on good paper, but now I've gone back to the bad stuff. I put matte medium on it. If you put matte medium on it, it seals up, so it doesn't really matter.

I have a painting where somebody's holding a chicken, and underneath the chicken is somebody's head.

I have done only two portraits: one of the artist Francesco Clemente and another of Andy Warhol.

I like kids' work more than work by real artists any day.

I want to make paintings that look as if they were made by a child.

I wanted to be a cartoonist when I was young.

I wanted to build up a name for myself.

I was a really lousy artist as a kid. Too abstract expressionist; or I'd draw a big ram's head, really messy. I'd never win painting contests. I remember losing to a guy who did a perfect Spiderman.

I'm not a real person. I'm a legend.

If I'm away from painting for a week, I get bored.

Occasionally, when I get mad at a woman, I'll do some great, awful painting about her.

Some days I can't get an idea, and I think, 'Man, I'm just washed up,' but it's just a mood.

The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them.

The country makes me more paranoid, you know? I think the crazy people out there are little crazier.

The more I paint the more I like everything.

There are about 30 words around you all the time, like 'thread' or 'exit.'

The country makes me more paranoid you know I think the crazy people out there are little crazier.

Every single line means something.

Painting's not important. The important thing is keeping busy.

Oh, what a bitter thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes.

It is not yet too late for the Indian people to decide on rapid, ordered progress. I can assure them that the British people are as determined upon self-government for India as they are themselves.

I've had a face-lift. I've had my eyes done; liposuction; the nose job - well, that was a long time ago.

I love being an enigma. Every time I'm tempted to respond to someone who tries to put me in a box, politically - you know, someone who gets on the Internet and says, you're pro-gun, or you're anti-gun - I stop and say to myself, 'This is great; this is what I wanted. I wanted to be the guy you can't figure out.'

Why should we not expect self-designated environmental leaders to practice what they preach?

I won't use abortion as a litmus test with a pro-choice individual. Someone that is an activist on the abortion issue, I think, goes outside the pale, and I cannot support an activist on the abortion issue.

My first-ever car, my parents bought me a red Fiat Uno. I was 17 and just so happy to have a car, so I was very fortunate that my parents were in a position to get me one - it was a secondhand car, but I was just so happy to have it.

I'm not that big a fan of sampling. But I feel like if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it to where it's more of a reimagining of a track. The songs that I do utilize samples on, most of it you wouldn't even be able to tell what it was unless I told you.

When I hung up my toe shoes, I didn't look back. In all my years, I have never looked back.

I feel like I'm ready for any dangerous situation that might come my way, provided I have a hammer on me.

Basically, as soon as I saw that there was a role available on '24,' I jumped at it, and then when I sat down and talked to them, it seemed to get more interesting and more fun.

The American public is sick and tired of being lied to.

Feminists say no-fault divorce was a large hurdle on the path to female liberation. They apparently don't consult the deepest hopes or greatest fears of young women.

I have sympathy for the people in Syria, and I do think there should be a worldwide response, but we should act cautiously.

'Hispanic' is a reference to Hispania, the name by which Spain was known in the Roman period, and there has always been strong ambivalence toward Spain in its former colonies.

There is no police brutality.

Mankind deserves sacrifice - but not of mankind.

I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift... you don't have to look too far in history to see that's just not the case.

But I just loved looking at the clothes of the '70s.