I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they're trying to write about. They have music.

I am not a great cook I am not a great artist but I love art and I love food so I am the perfect traveller.

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero Andy Warhol who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.

Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet as well as one of the wealthiest but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah fashion merchandising adoption melodramas the gym and ill-starred horseback riding to study art.

In our life there is a single color as on an artist's palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?

In every work of art the subject is primordial whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject the form is always in proportion to the obsession.

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

The art world can be very intimidating because it's just so vast. You talk to people who are really clued in to all the young artists and coming into it you're never going to be able to catch up immediately even though there's pressure to.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

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

I'm very much into the costuming of any character that I portray and it's one of the great things about making movies is it's a collaborative art form so you get all these artists who are looking specifically about for this instance your character's costume and what that might tell about your character.

Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

A nation devoid of art and artists cannot have a full existence.

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

I love art dealers. In some ways they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is create their own aesthetic universes support artists employ people and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art thinking that except for their tremendous gardens that the English are not primarily visual artists and are in nearly unsurpassable ways literary.