Anybody who writes knows the horrible, wonderful, beautiful foulness that comes every week. A lot of moaning, screaming agony - "Oh my god, the deadline's coming."

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.

Let's not cry about it, shall we, Marcy? Let's pray about it instead. A Passion Most Pure

When you counsel someone, you should appear to be reminding him of something he had forgotten, not of the light he was unable to see.

Oh for a tongue to curse the slave Whose treason, like a deadly blight, Comes o'er the councils of the brave, And blasts them in their hour of might!

I found out that it's not good to talk about my troubles. Eighty percent of the people who hear them don't care and the other twenty percent are glad you're having them.

Commitment is a big part of what I am and what I believe. How committed are you to winning? How committed are you to being a good friend?

I don't feel that I have to control every aspect of things that I appear in. You learn a lot performing someone else's writing.

My dad always told me that anyone's voice is just another instrument added to the music.

Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails upon me the penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains that crime and justifies it.

The mad also laugh, or is that what Freud and the others discovered perhaps, that only the mad laugh?