The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it - it's as immediate and as superficial as that.

Art has knowledge and skills, and to come to know them is to be implicitly against a culture that is against knowledge - today's mass culture, which aims to produce a lot of consuming morons.

I think with art you have to do a bit of transforming of the subject to make the art worth having.

Artists don't often know much about writing... but they don't bray so much about writing as writers do about art.

The most painful thing for me is to be misunderstood.

What is painting today? It's a discontinued thing, discontinued from anything serious that happened in the past.

The whole idea of ideas in art is useless. Only have ideas about form.

Colour can be the true main thing in art that is widely valued – even valued by the maker of the art – for other meanings.

Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.

You can't go too wrong with books

The United States was born in the country and moved to the city in the nineteenth century.

Ultimately, blind faith is the only kind.

I'm an ordinary guy with an extraordinary job.

When you're shooting 20-odd episodes in a season, the last thing you want is for each script to be the same tone.

Displaying riches and titles with pride brings about one's downfall.

Where there is hunger there is no hope. There is only desolation and pain. Hunger nurtures violence and fanaticism. A world where people starve will never be safe

I did what I knew.. when I knew better, I did better

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.