The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

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.

To stand on a mountain top, you must first create the mountain.

Pessimistic" is a word for "realistic" that optimists use to make themselves feel better (about their unrealisticness).

I don't watch that much comedy. I think it's professional jealousy. That and a lack of support for my community.

What is human in me is not what is best in me. What is human in me is that I desire, and to obtain what I desire, I believe I would crush anything that stood in my way.

Occasions are rare; and those, who know how to seize upon them, are rarer.

I was very lucky with 'Soap' and 'Who's the Boss,' which was great fun, and then went on 'Coach' and 'Everybody Loves Raymond.' I've been truly blessed, and the work has all been fun and a joy.

there is a pernicious tendency to make the opinions of the expert prevail by crowd methods, to rush the people instead of educating them.

When I started, (players) were making $4,000. Now, they don't get out of bed and they already make $10,000.

Even evangelicals realize that Pinocchio's father was a carpenter too. That's the old joke.

Beauty is a delightful prejudice.