Every picture one paints involves not painting others.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Art is an experience, not an object.

Walk on a rainbow trail; walk on a trail of song, and all about you will be beauty. There is a way out of every dark mist, over a rainbow trail.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself; it is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response - though he seldom makes it - would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out.

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

The main thing is not to be dead.

It's not that the creative act and the critical act are simultaneous. It's more like you blurt something out and then analyze it.

Dear Teenage Self, That guy you're crazy about, Will ask you out On a dateIn about ten years, so don't fretYou'll get there yet.But fate is cruelOn that day, That feeling will have gone away.

Humans are, as Sartre put it, ‘condemned to be free’. To insist that science, or God, objectively defines moral values is to abandon our responsibility as human beings to make such judgments.

Night coaxed out the stars, my jailers.

Somehow, we [ Tan Dun and director Chen Kaige] were all privileged at the time; we could be outside of China. But at the moment, we had no sense of what the future was going to be like.

We change when the pain to change is less than the pain to remain as we are.

Equity money is dynamic and debt money is static.

Authority figures always attract trouble

I want to see something I've never seen before.