I am a great lover of art in many forms: paintings objets textiles. I don't have the talent for painting but I have a very good sense of colour a love of visual beauty.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history that he redefined the idea of beauty that he combined painting sculpture photography and everyday life with such gall and that he was interested in as he put it 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

Romance and novel paint beauty in colors more charming than nature and describe a happiness that humans never taste. How deceptive and destructive are those pictures of consummate bliss!

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale you could not ignore its beauty.

At some point in life the world's beauty becomes enough. You don't need to photograph paint or even remember it. It is enough.

In my world history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting a play a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings and every time I look at them I see something different.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.

One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It's why he found shooting on set boring - because he had already composed the film in his head.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order order in yourself. There is much chaos in me much chaos in our time.

I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

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.

At the beginning of the 20th century the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music which was then considered as the noblest art.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression whether they are paintings sculptures tragedies or musical compositions.

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.

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection the bar has been set pretty low.

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.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs photographs of advertising sculpture with ready-made objects videos using already-existing film.

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.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

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.