I think Prince should open up a little more to other artists. Just because we love Prince. Especially the old stuff - we love him to death. But if he opened up he would be something to deal with. Imagine Kanye West producing a Prince track? It would be banoodles!

My dad was a huge country music fan but he also had a band and he sang. So he'd listen to a lot of music and the songs that he'd learn for the band were more from the male artists. So my earliest country memories were Waylon Jennings Conway Twitty George Jones Johnny Paycheck even.

My dad's side of the family had lots of artists and musicians. There's an emotional quite sentimental quality to Slavic culture. It's very open it loves art it loves music it loves literature. It's very warm it's very up it's very down. I would celebrate that.

I've always been inspired by artists who have shown musical and intellectual curiosity and the courage to take risks.

It's a really cool time for artists who want to strive for a little more depth in what they want to say to come forward. We live in a very fast world right now. We've got all this media and music which is so accessible to us it's here one minute gone the next.

I influenced the BG style by not being able to draw perspective. The BG artists developed cool graphic painting styles to make my bad backgrounds look like they were that way on purpose.

I'm taking a lot of my favorite artists different people my favorite music and marrying that with what I do as a comic. It's very collaborative arty fun and cool.

The new artists coming through were very materialistic and Hollywood not so engaged in communication.

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it but they're happy if they do get it.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

In the music business especially the country music business every 10 years or so you're going to have this changing of the guard this wave of new artists that comes in.

The people who are competing business-wise out there want what other successful labels and artists have. I don't want what they have I want my own path my own sound my own identity. Record labels care nothing about identity or artistic freedom they want good business.

Artists are notoriously snooty and suspicious of anything coming from the business community.

The business side of film has goofed up so many things but even that's changing. It happened to the music industry and now it's happening to the film studios. It's crazy what's going on. But artists should have control of their work especially if as I always say you never turn down a good idea and never take a bad idea.

People assume that all artists make for terrible business people but I'm in complete charge of my own career.

A grocer is attracted to his business by a magnetic force as great as the repulsion which renders it odious to artists.

I want to talk to the bullied kids of the world. Tell them to hang on it will get better. Know that an 'Iron Chef ' actors musicians artists and all successful people have probably been bullied in their life. And the best part of your life is yet to come. Whatever it takes to live do it!

There are two kinds of artists in this world those that work because the spirit is in them and they cannot be silent if they would and those that speak from a conscientious desire to make apparent to others the beauty that has awakened their own admiration.

Who knows better than artists how much ugliness there is on the way to beauty how many ghastly mortifying missteps how many days of granitic blockheadedness and dismaying ineptitude there is on the way to accomplishment how partial all accomplishment is how incomplete?

For I must tell you that we artists cannot tread the path of Beauty without Eros keeping company with us and appointing himself as our guide.

I find beauty in the grotesque like most artists.

It's really interesting with art-movies too but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.

There are a lot of female artists my age around at the moment but they're all American and blonde and blue-eyed and smiley. I'm totally the opposite of that. I want to show a bit more attitude and I have an opinion.

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.