I love a lot of the New York bands but Patti Smith stands out. I just read 'Just Kids' and it's an inspirational well-written account of an emerging New York artist in the late seventies.

I am very conscious of who I am as an artist and as an inspirational person.

I will always desire to play with Bruce Springsteen. He's the most inspirational most dedicated most committed and most focused artist I've ever seen. I like to be around people like that.

The product of the scientific imagination is a new vision of relations - like that of artistic imagination.

There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson Walt Disney Charlie Chaplin people who understand the joy of the imagination.

The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.

For some reason I can't explain artist and musicians tend to look younger than our age. Being in music you need this youthful sense of discovery and wonder for what you're doing and keep your imagination open. That's a youthful way of looking at life and I think that reflects in how you age.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.

I hope that I'm sexy in a different kind of way than I think that a lot of girls are right now. I think a lot of girls in the public eye especially musical artists are just kind of objectified a little bit and wearing super-skimpy outfits and leaving nothing to the imagination.

Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists but belongs in varying degrees to all men.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life in this way not to evade destiny as the ordinary people try to do but to fulfil it in its true potential - the imagination.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination where they meet in the myth.

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

I regard the writing of humor as a supreme artistic challenge.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

If you live through the initial stage of fame and get past it and remember thats not who you are. If you live past that then you have a hope of maybe learning how to spell the word artist.

Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80.

I hope what I do has an art to it and as an artist you have to try new things and keep yourself entertained.

I would hope they would be our fellow artists rather than trying to emulate or idolize clowns like us.

I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

The house has to please everyone contrary to the work of art which does not. The work is a private matter for the artist. The house is not.

I have a long-standing history of respecting artists' wishes.

Our culture now wonderfully alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.