The theatre only knows what it's doing next week not like the opera where they say: What are we going to do in five years' time? A completely different attitude.

Even with or perhaps because of this background I have over the past few years sensed a very dramatic change in attitude on the part of Prince Edward Islanders towards the on-going rush for so-called modernization.

I went to England in the '70s and I was in my early 20s. There was still a residue of that era of being an underclass or colonial. I assume it must have been a more aggressive and prominent attitude 40 years before that because Australia internationally wasn't regarded as having much cultural value. We were a country full of sheep and convicts.

By making a comeback I'm changing the attitude of people toward me. If I'd known that people would react so enthusiastically I'd have done it years ago.

Most of my arguments with musicians through the years have had more to do with their attitude about music or their attitude about their own lives or their personal responsibility. Music has never really been the big centerpiece of the fight.

When I was a child I asked my mother what homosexuality was about and she said - and this was 100 years ago in Germany and she was very open-minded - 'It's like hair color. It's nothing. Some people are blond and some people have dark hair. It's not a subject.' This was a very healthy attitude.

For nine years I worked to change what was hairdressing then into a geometric art form with color perm without setting which had never been done before.

I'd like to introduce someone who has just come into my life. I've admired him for 35 years. He's someone who represents integrity honesty art and on top of that stuff I'm actually sleeping with him.

It has taken me years of struggle hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple beautiful sentence.

I think people should be given a test much like driver's tests as to whether they're capable of being parents! It's an art form. I talk a lot. And I think a lot. And I draw a lot. But never in a million years would I have been a parent. That's just work that's too hard.

It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent subtle and sophisticated people with organized societies and great art.

I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.

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.

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.

With care and skill and cunning art She parried Time's malicious dart And kept the years at bay Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!

Many say an art dealer running a museum is a 'conflict of interest.' But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.

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.

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.

It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations large paintings and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.

Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.

Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste momentary glitches in an artist's work or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times however these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3 000 years.

When science art literature and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible which can make a man's name live for thousands of years.