My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.

Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude which our eye perceives which art reproduces and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

Chaotic people often have chaotic lives and I think they create that. But if you try and have an inner peace and a positive attitude I think you attract that.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then by simply changing the key we keep up the attraction and vary the song.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly decisively for good.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties and then tailing off.

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.