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

Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.

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.

Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.

Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.

The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life.