Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain.

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.

(on forgiveness) Didn't he and I stand together before an all seeing God convicted of the same murder? For I had murdered him with my heart and my tongue.

Let me tell you what justice is. Justice is the law. And that man's feeble attempt to lay down the principles of deceny.

From Day 1 I wasnt planning to run until I am very old.

When I'm not acting, I'm at the beach. I like to spend a lot of time in the water, surfing.

The writer's Queen Victoria is his public, and he would do well to keep a bust of the old Queen on his desk with the legend "We are not amused" hanging from it.

A better idea than my own is to listen.

Let your youth have free reign, it won't come again, so be bold and no repenting.

There is no sense in crying over spilt milk. Why bewail what is done and cannot be recalled?

A well-off plastic surgeon can suffer just as much as an Irish lad who has been abused or whatever.