Think of an abstract painting as very, very low relief - a thing, not a picture.

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.

There are two days in my calendar: This day and that Day.

This is how I disappear in pieces.This is how I leave while not moving from my seat.This is how I dance away.This is how I'm gone before you wake.

Getting fit is a political act-you are taking charge of your life.

Humor comes in all forms, and everyone has their cup of tea about what makes them laugh. But the day we censor humor is a sad one for sure.

Whatever road I take, the guiding star is within me; the guiding star and the loadstone which point the way. They point in but one direction. They point to me.

A medical profession founded on callousness to the pain of the other animals may eventually destroy its own sensibility to the pain of humans.

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.

I am and always will be a Muslim. My religion is Islam.

God is good all the time. Every time.

A man's mind grows narrow in a narrow place.