I have been very interested and intrigued and congratulatory toward President Bush and his paintings.

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

I love wisdom. And you can never be great at anything unless you love it. Not be in love with it, but love the thing, admire the thing. And it seems that if you love the thing, and you don’t just want to possess it, it will find you.

I admire people who dare to take the language, English, and understand it and understand the melody.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Men admire the man who can organize their wishes and thoughts in stone and wood and steel and brass.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

No one could have been nicer, classier nor better looking than Dick Clark. I’ve had a crush on him since I was a teenager.

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.

I draw from the crowd a lot.

I was totally dominated and revered my father. I admired everything he did. He was a great sports person. He loved me. I was his only boy at that time, before my brother Billy came along.

A masterpiece is something said once and for all, stated, finished, so that it’s there complete in the mind, if only at the back.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

When art dresses in worn-out material it is most easily recognized as art.

I do some kind of work, whether writing or painting or recording, on a daily basis. And it’s so essential that when I’m involved in the actual process, my so-called ‚real life‘ becomes almost incidental, which becomes worrying.

The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions.

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.

It seemed like a very small possibility for me to become an artist. I didn’t have the need to be on the stage; I didn’t feel the need to be heard. I just needed to write.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

When I went back to my old high school, all these kids looking at me like I’m the real big homie, the same way I look at Jay Z, Nas, or Dr. Dre. You would’ve thought Michael Jackson walked through that joint off the excitement that they had.

I love artists like Prince, who hold on to that element of mystery.

Shakespeare – I was very influenced – still am – by Shakespeare. I couldn’t believe that a white man in the 16th century could so know my heart.

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

Frank Lloyd Wright… his things were beautiful but not very functional.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Art never harms itself by keeping aloof from the social problems of the day: rather, by so doing, it more completely realises for us that which we desire.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they’re good or there because they’re lucky.

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

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.

Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity – and I don’t mean simple – it’ll be good, and the public will know it.

Nothing is capable of being well set to music that is not nonsense.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians, poets, and artists, and zoologists, and historians. They also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hadn’t been computer science, these people would have been doing amazing things in other fields.

When you come to see a picture of mine, I want you to know that I’m not going to do anything that will make you uncomfortable. I want you to know that you won’t be disappointed in me.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

Bob Dylan is like an alien on this earth, and I love him! I cried when I saw him play live because I was so close to him.

Music belongs to the people. To no one else. To no one else.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

The arts have only ever interested a small minority of people, which acted as a kind of nursery to support artists.

In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character; there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

Fools admire, but men of sense approve.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

I love soccer, love tennis… Roger Federer has been a favourite for a long, long time. The kind of consistency he has shown, 16 Grand Slam titles… The way he handles himself in pressure situations is admirable… He is so calm… In soccer, I’m a huge fan of Barcelona… I like watching Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and David Villa.

Like so many American families, our families weren’t asking for much. They didn’t begrudge anyone else’s success or care that others had much more than they did… in fact, they admired it.

I admire Ralph Nader and Denis Kucinich very much, and insofar as they bring up issues and carry out an educational and organisational function – that’s important, and fine, and I support it.

All good art is an indiscretion.

Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the natural.

I was always interested in choreography – in making people think and feel something.

Instead of stubbornly attempting to use surrealism for purposes of subversion, it is necessary to try to make of surrealism something as solid, complete and classic as the works of museums.

I call architecture frozen music.

I don’t consider myself an intellectual. And this is not one of my aims. But I admire intellectual people.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

Any artist, the work you do, if it’s a painting or if it’s a performance, you hope it translates to a common denominator with the people that they see something in their own life in there. Or they see something in somebody else’s life. That’s what’s fun about sharing art.

Barbra Streisand has accomplished so much, and Dustin Hoffman as well. They are down to earth and approachable. I admire that.

The more I think about it, the more I realize there is nothing more artistic than to love others.

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