All artists and creative people are basically unhappy people. If you were happy, that would mean you were content with the world as it was and why would you ever want to change it?

It's my duty to sell the ideas. But there's always a question when it comes to beauty.

For Rembrandt, reality is role-playing.... Everyone is portrayed in relation to a social hierarchy.

Artists are sometimes in a position to tell the truth, but they're positioned as a Cassandra. They're gifted with impeccable prophecy and the assurance of never being listened to.

My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.