Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Real art has been… what’s the word? Kidnapped? No, that’s not it. But, OK, kidnapped by business.

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 would like to be remembered as a guy who had a set of priorities, and was willing to live by those priorities. In terms of accomplishments, my biggest accomplishment is that I kept the country safe amidst a real danger.

Man becomes his most creative during war.

Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.

The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.

Genius creates, and taste preserves. Taste is the good sense of genius; without taste, genius is only sublime folly.

As a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, I know that the men and women of our intelligence community put their lives on the line every day, and they do very dangerous work to keep our country safe.

In a country with millions of people and cars going everywhere, the enemy is going to get a car bomb out there once in awhile.

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force.

It’s going to be a season with lots of accidents, and I’ll risk saying that we’ll be lucky if something really serious doesn’t happen.

Educate and inform the whole mass of the people… They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of our liberty.

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin – find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

We could definitely make a flying car – but that’s not the hard part. The hard part is, how do you make a flying car that’s super safe and quiet? Because if it’s a howler, you’re going to make people very unhappy.

Before I do a stunt, I have to make sure it is safe.

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

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.

If the Almighty were to rebuild the world and asked me for advice, I would have English Channels round every country. And the atmosphere would be such that anything which attempted to fly would be set on fire.

If someone attacks me, and they want to punch or kick me, I can just run away. They’re not holding onto me. I can get away from them.

I’ve had a fan who made a painting of my face with her fingers. I have put it up in my room. It was sweet and very different.

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

Painting is concerned with all the 10 attributes of sight; which are: Darkness, Light, Solidity and Colour, Form and Position, Distance and Propinquity, Motion and Rest.

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

Bad people are, from the point of view of art, fascinating studies. They represent colour, variety and strangeness. Good people exasperate one’s reason; bad people stir one’s imagination.

Music is like film to me.

An architect should live as little in cities as a painter. Send him to our hills, and let him study there what nature understands by a buttress, and what by a dome.

Jesus lived a life that was full of joy and contradictions and fights, you know? If they were to paint a picture of Jesus without contradictions, the gospels would be fake, but the contradictions are a sign of authenticity.

In art the best is good enough.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

The most violent appetites in all creatures are lust and hunger; the first is a perpetual call upon them to propagate their kind, the latter to preserve themselves.

I like having my hands in the clay. I like the movie-making process.

Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.

Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

I’ve started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I’d be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

All my pictures are built around the idea of getting in trouble and so giving me the chance to be desperately serious in my attempt to appear as a normal little gentleman.

Yes, there is a terrible moral in ‚Dorian Gray‘ – a moral which the prurient will not be able to find in it, but it will be revealed to all whose minds are healthy. Is this an artistic error? I fear it is. It is the only error in the book.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

It isn’t necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.

In too much of the West, everyone wants the guarantee of safety, and never having to make any decisions.

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

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

Music is this divine thing, the closest that we can get to something divine. It’s like this instinct we all own, and some of us have found a way to hear that music and write it down and share it with people.

I had rather see the portrait of a dog that I know, than all the allegorical paintings they can show me in the world.

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.

The spread of civilisation may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.

I think there’s a lot of similarity between what people try to do with religion with what they want from art. In fact, I very specifically think that they are same thing. Not that religion and art are the same, but that they both tap into the same need we have for surrender.

In a budget, how important is art versus music versus athletics versus computer programming? At the end of the day, some of those trade-offs will be made politically.

I’m born with a pencil in my hand. I did lots of sketching.

I wanted very much to learn to draw, for a reason that I kept to myself: I wanted to convey an emotion I have about the beauty of the world.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream.

I see drawings and pictures in the poorest of huts and the dirtiest of corners.

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.

When I have a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

I don’t think anybody in America ought to be scared.

Like a pianist runs her fingers over the keys, I’ll search my mind for what to say. Now, the poem may want you to write it. And then sometimes you see a situation and think, ‚I’d like to write about that.‘ Those are two different ways of being approached by a poem, or approaching a poem.

We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.