Auctions are bizarre combinations of slave market, trading floor, theatre and burlesque... a lot of people are going to be making a lot of excuses or maintaining that they were never part of this.

John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.

To engage with art, we have to be willing to be wrong, venture outside our psychic comfort zones, suspend disbelief, and remember that art explores and alters consciousness simultaneously.

Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.

All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I've ever seen them before.

A lot of people still think caring about clothes is a dubious, unserious, frivolous, girlie thing.

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.

The secret of food lies in memory - of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.

Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

Families are so beautiful. Wherever we may be, looking at kids and happy families make us feel like home.

The convenient function of every celebrated machine for living is to produce machines to live in them.

I try to eat whatever I want. I don't like putting myself on a diet, but I try to eat organic, healthy, and lean with lots of green vegetables.

"Lawyers Are": The only civil delinquents whose judges must of necessity be chosen from (amongst) themselves.

If you want to get ahead in this world get a lawyer -- not a book.

No domain of nature is quite closed to man at all times.

Help yourself and God will help you

I'm not looking to lose anything. I'm looking to continue making movies.

Charity in various guises is an intruder the poor see often; but courtesy and delicacy are visitants with which they are seldom honored.

Repetition is the mother of skill.