The forties seventies and the nineties when money was scarce were great periods when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.

The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten and the more a picture has to give the greater it is.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

I get in trouble when I say things like 'I'm attracted to violence.' I was a pretty angry kid and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from.

President Obama clearly cannot run on his record. All he's offering is more of the same. That's not good. Look at the economy. It's stagnating. And so what they're now going to try and do is bring this campaign down to little things distractions distortions smear fear anger frustration.

So now cut to ten years later and I'm making this amazing contract with Pantene. It's incredible.

Yes the companionship is amazing. You know you can get that physical attraction that happens is great but then there's an awful lot of time and the rest of the day that you have to fill.

I hope I'm not a tourist attraction - I'm sure that they come here really because St. Andrews is just amazing a beautiful place.

There are two sorts of curiosity - the momentary and the permanent. The momentary is concerned with the odd appearance on the surface of things. The permanent is attracted by the amazing and consecutive life that flows on beneath the surface of things.

If you saw Queen Elizabeth it would be amazing she came from another planet. She was so attractive in what she was wearing.

For the last 20 years of my life I've had the mantra to do amazing parts with amazing people in amazing projects so I'm attracted to good story writing and character and good people. That's what I'm always searching for and I don't think that's ever going to change.

If you dream of something worth doing and then simply go to work on it and don't think anything of personalities or emotional conflicts or of money or of family distractions it is amazing how quickly you get through those 5 000 steps.

Costumes and scenery alone will not attract audiences.