If you can't take a good kicking, you shouldn't parade how much luckier you are than other people.

Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on.

My aim in life isn't so much the pursuit of happiness as the happiness of pursuit.

Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. What matters and survives is the art.

By and large, talent is in such short supply that mediocrity can be taken for brilliance rather more than genius can go undiscovered.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

Be the Worst You Can Be: Life's Too Long for Patience and Virtue

The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today.

There are no rules about investment. Sharks can be good. Artist's dung can be good. Oil on canvas can be good.

I don't buy art in order to leave a mark or to be remembered; clutching at immortality is of zero interest to anyone sane.

Nobody can give you advice after you've been collecting for a while. If you don't enjoy making your own decisions, you're never going to be much of a collector anyway.

We cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

What thou thyself hatest do to no man.

Whether we like it or not asking is the rule of the Kingdom.

The best way to deal with bureaucrats is with stealth and sudden violence.

I think my work is very American because I'm American. But I found that Europeans like uncertainty and doubt.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.

Where we have a different background [with Hillary Clinton] on this issue is we differ on the war in Iraq, which created barbaric organizations like ISIS.

A fellow in a market town, Most musical, cried razors up and down.

But quiet to quick bosoms is a hell.

Being in the Tuileries is not everything: what matters is to stay here.