“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.”

“Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding.”

“There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”

“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.”

“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”

“Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.”

“Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?”

“Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.”

“We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.”

“Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.”

“My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.”

“If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.”

“Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.”

“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”

“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.”

“The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.”

“Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.”

“A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.”

“The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes, placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact, transform both, and create a third thing.”

“Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that's irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.”

“My trade and art is to live.”