Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.

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.

If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he'd never stop throwing up.

For the last third of life there remains only work. It alone is always stimulating rejuvenating exciting and satisfying.

This is the one and only firmament; therefore it is the absolute world. There is no other world. The circle is complete. I am living in Eternity. The ways of this world are the ways of Heaven.

Grace means you're in a different universe from where you had been stuck, when you had absolutely no way to get there on your own.

You must not let yourself become too respectable. Keep yourself a little wild. What is life for, if not for the living of it?

Water is a pioneer which the settler follows, taking advantage of its improvements.

To get hold of your boys you must be their friend.

I got good advice once. Someone said to me: 'Live in your money rather than look at it.

What the hell am I doing here?

Life is a continuous cycle of once-terrifying things becoming normal.