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.

Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.

Death is not our destiny. Longing for true love is our true destiny. That is where we will find the ultimate meaning of life.

I understand now that you cannot fight for a noble cause with heinous actions.

Cats aren’t as friendly as they appear: fur, teeth, instinct, selfishness and cunning. Essentially they’re just big rats.

The fact is, the heart and mind aren't always friendly. And in my case, they're barely speaking.

It's so normal for a teenager to dress in black -- and be real unhappy and stay in your room and say sarcastic things. How could something so normal be considered morbid?

I've had some dark nights of the soul, of course, but giving in to depression would be a sellout, a defeat.

To love my neighbor is to assist the arising and unfolding in him of that which can harmonize the real elements of his nature.

It is natural and harmless in English to use a preposition to end a sentence with.

I believe in doing what I am best at.

I love mathematics not only because it is applicable to technology but also because it is beautiful.