The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

Iraq is just a symbol of the attitude of western democracies to the rest of the world.

An attitude to life which seeks fulfillment in the single-minded pursuit of wealth - in short materialism - does not fit into this world because it contains within itself no limiting principle while the environment in which it is placed is strictly limited.

It's sort of a mental attitude about critical thinking and curiosity. It's about mindset of looking at the world in a playful and curious and creative way.

Your attitude is like a box of crayons that color your world. Constantly color your picture gray and your picture will always be bleak. Try adding some bright colors to the picture by including humor and your picture begins to lighten up.

My attitude to peace is rather based on the Burmese definition of peace - it really means removing all the negative factors that destroy peace in this world. So peace does not mean just putting an end to violence or to war but to all other factors that threaten peace such as discrimination such as inequality poverty.

A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before the change.

Black Consciousness is an attitude of the mind and a way of life the most positive call to emanate from the black world for a long time.

In my world history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting a play a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

All I owe the world is my art.

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then like any great place it collapsed and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.

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.

I want to serve chess through games books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world.

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world but I don't mind I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore is there?

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera theater music and dance are thriving all over the world but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Actually I think Art lies in both directions - the broad strokes big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand that kind of thing.

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

In the world of language or in other words in the world of art and liberal education religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.

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 smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries for instance to Africa but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

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.

Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.