My mother was born in Baltimore, and before her marriage, she was an artist and teacher of art.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

The best marriages are the ones where we can go out in the world and really put ourselves out there. A lot of times we’ll fail, and sometimes we’ll pull it off. But good marriages are when you can go home and know that your vulnerability will be honored as courage, and that you’ll find support.

My mother was determined to make us independent. When I was four years old, she stopped the car a few miles from our house and made me find my own way home across the fields. I got hopelessly lost.

Never marry someone in hope that they’ll change later.

Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.

I think it is perfectly natural for any artist to admire intensely and love a young man. It is an incident in the life of almost every artist.

Tell your wife often how terrific she looks.

I think I first realized I wanted to be in country music and be an artist when I was 10. And I started dragging my parents to festivals, and fairs, and karaoke contests, and I did that for about a year before I came to Nashville for the first time. I was 11 and I had this demo CD of me singing Dixie Chicks and Leanne Rimes songs.

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.

Nothing new here, except my marrying, which to me is a matter of profound wonder.

Wives are young men’s mistresses, companions for middle age, and old men’s nurses.

I am an artist, and I have the ability and the free will to choose the way the world will envision me.

Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It’s a black wall. It’s a thief.

To be in any way a positive contribution, that’s all anybody wants to be. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to be. I wanted to be an artist, be a mother. You want to feel that in your life you’ve been of use, in whatever way that comes out.

The only really happy folk are married women and single men.

In the Western Church to which I belong, priests cannot be married as in the Byzantine, Ukrainian, Russian or Greek Catholic Churches. In those churches, the priests can be married, but the bishops have to be celibate. They are very good priests.

I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.

If you want to give up the admiration of thousands of men for the distain of one, go ahead, get married.

Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will have the truth about him.

It’s a curse. I ask God to take this away from me all the time. I do not like being an artist.

I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? To read – if not indeed write – the obituaries of elderly villains like Henry Kissinger and Joseph Ratzinger?

For it is mutual trust, even more than mutual interest that holds human associations together. Our friends seldom profit us but they make us feel safe. Marriage is a scheme to accomplish exactly that same end.

I am indebted to my father for living, but to my teacher for living well.

Paintings have a life of their own that derives from the painter’s soul.

The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

I’m married to an Italian woman, and I used to love cooking Italian at home, because it’s one-pot cooking. But my wife does not approve of my Italian cooking.

Each morning when I awake, I experience again a supreme pleasure – that of being Salvador Dali.

I used to tell my husband that, if he could make me ‚understand‘ something, it would be clear to all the other people in the country.

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

Nothing flatters a man as much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

My wife and I tried two or three times in the last 40 years to have breakfast together, but it was so disagreeable we had to stop.

A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‚We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.‘

I’m a good teacher and am great at observation and picking out what’s wrong and fixing it.

It’s hard for anybody who’s been with me not to feel starved for affection when I’m making love to my ideas. Maybe it’s not meant for me to settle down and be married.

Husbands never become good; they merely become proficient.

In my house I’m the boss, my wife is just the decision maker.

People still think of me as a cartoonist, but the only thing I lift a pen or pencil for these days is to sign a contract, a check, or an autograph.

The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything.

In our monogamous part of the world, to marry means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties.

I married my best friend that happens to be a girl.

We were at a beach one summer, and I had a bathing suit on. My wife looked at me and said: ‚Boy, you are skinny, aren’t you?‘ I said: ‚Honey, I’d like to remind you that it was minor defects like this that kept me from getting a better wife.‘

A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.

Regarding marriage, it – somehow, it didn’t happen. One fellow in such a big family not getting married is not an issue.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

I’ve never had a dislike for men. I’ve been badly treated by some. But I’ve been loved greatly by some. I married a lot of them.

I subscribe to the myth that an artist’s creativity comes from torment. Once that’s fixed, what do you draw on?

Our Nation must defend the sanctity of marriage.

I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity, and that includes all kinds of parts.

I do probably 60 concerts a year in the States. And I go out to clubs in the week. I’m doing new stuff all the time.

In search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.

Take my wife… Please!

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

I don’t think marriage is a civil right, but I think that being able to transfer property is a civil right.

What makes a song last is real content from a mind that is thinking a little bit harder about certain things. A lot of artists don’t really think that hard.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

I am Warhol. I am the No. 1 most impactful artist of our generation. I am Shakespeare in the flesh.

My mother and my father have been married 50 years, and he’s just started to understand that something’s wrong with the system. He accepted the whole thing, you see. Yet this industrious kind of engagement didn’t bring him the success, according to American terms, that he wanted. I was probably affected by this very much. In fact, I know I was.

Never take a wife till thou hast a house (and a fire) to put her in.