The media, the galleries, the collectors - it's all very chaotic actually. The artworld doesn't have this defined corporate structure that people imagine.

Art is something that happens inside us. We look at things in the world, and we become excited by them. We understand our own possibilities of becoming. And that's what art is.

Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.

I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.

Art is about profundity. It's about connecting to everything that it means to be alive, but you have to act.

Art is obsolete now. New technologies are taking over.

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material.

Every day I wake up and I really try to pinch myself to take advantage of today and to use that freedom of gesture to do what I really like to do.

I think about my work every minute of the day.

I know how art has come in and really changed my life, so to give these children that opportunity just to come into contact with art - that's wonderful.

I love the gallery, the arena of representation. It's a commercial world, and morality is based generally around economics, and that's taking place in the art gallery.

Well, just get used to it, because you're a long ways away from Kansas, my dear. She actually started singing "The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow" as she traipsed to the counter.

Let your personality be your profit and not your punishment.

Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.

I feel good when I'm engaged in what I think are the core issues of the society, and those core issues to me are what's happening to poor folks in this society.

Even when I did Ryan Gosling's movie (Lost River), we had a very '80s kind of vibe and I would say for two or three months after that, I was dressing in a very sort of '80s way.

Success doesn't come instantly. Neither does the ability to lead.

It takes far less courage to kill yourself than it takes to wake up one more time. It is harder to stay where you are than to get out.

Childhood memories are sometimes covered and obscured beneath the things that come later, like childhood toys forgotten at the bottom of a crammed adult closet, but they are never lost for good.

A wise man speaks because he has something to say; a fool because he has to say something.

I hate a man who always says yes to me. When I say no I like a man who also says no.