It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet and the art stuff seems more about ideas.

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves they run about loose hungering for employment and satisfy themselves in various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations which have all to do with making things already made is the making of people: it is called the art of friendship.

Smiles come naturally to me but I started thinking of them as an art form at my command. I studied all the time. I looked at magazines I'd practice in front of the mirror and I'd ask photographers about the best angles. I can now pull out a smile at will.

I just wish the crowd I was associated with was more passionate about what they were doing and less consumed with the commerce of the art form.

I don't watch television I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

Becoming emancipated at 14 my life wasn't normal. I didn't have to go to school so I didn't. I was rebellious by nature. I spent my 20s focusing on my company Flower Films and producing movies. Now that I'm almost 30 I would like to try other things in lie. I'm crazy about photography and I want to take an art history class.

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.

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.

I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage to love my first language Spanish to learn about Mexican history music folk art food and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.

We're all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. We're also allowed to change or modify our opinions.

Jeffrey Deitch is the Jeff Koons of art dealers. Not because he's the biggest best or the richest of his kind. But because in some ways he's the weirdest (which is saying a lot when you're talking about the wonderful wicked lovable and annoying creatures known as art dealers).

When museums are built these days architects directors and trustees seem most concerned about social space: places to have parties eat dinner wine-and-dine donors. Sure these are important these days - museums have to bring in money - but they gobble up space and push the art itself far away from the entrance.

I don't know much about auctions. I sometimes go to previews and see art sardined into ugly rooms. I've gawked at the gaudy prices and gaped at well-clad crowds of happy white people conspicuously spending hundreds of millions of dollars.

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.

Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public out in the open.

The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter surface color composition touch scale form or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.

A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.

Much good art got made while money ruled I like a lot of it and hardship and poverty aren't virtues. The good news is that since almost no one will be selling art artists - especially emerging ones - won't have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They'll be able to experiment as much as they want.

It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations that tries to transform decay into something generative that is replicative in a baroque way that isn't about progress and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.'

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

Yes 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.