George Bernard Shaw

Choose silence of all virtues, for by it you hear other men’s imperfections, and conceal your own.

A man who has no office to go to – I don’t care who he is – is a trial of which you can have no conception.

Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.

Here there is no hope, and consequently no duty, no work, nothing to be gained by praying, nothing to be lost by doing what you like. Hell, in short, is a place where you have nothing to do but amuse yourself.

The world is populated in the main by people who should not exist.

Dying is a troublesome business: there is pain to be suffered, and it wrings one’s heart; but death is a splendid thing –a warfare accomplished, a beginning all over again, a triumph. You can always see that in their faces.

Eventually, most people felt MoMA had filled a very important gap.

Art is constant tension and release. That is where artists live, between the two or at times, submerged in either.

I’m just an individual who doesn’t feel that I need to have somebody qualify my work in any particular way. I’m working for me.

I think of art as the highest level of creativity. To me, it is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment.

The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.

We’ll buy some drugs and watch a band and jump in a river holding hands.

A poem is a naked person… Some people say that I am a poet.

It’s like telling Michelangelo: ‘I know you painted this dope angel, that was really good, but Michelangelo, I don’t think you can paint a cow.’

Nothing will stop you from being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake.

I don’t know where I’m going from here, but I promise it won’t be boring.

In the field of art, to be able to have lunch with Kirk Varnedoe is thrilling. I met him at Si and Victoria Newhouse’s dinner one night. Barnett Newman’s widow was there. That’s the part of me that’s a fan. Like when I was a kid and went to the Brooklyn Paramount. Well, my interest has expanded, and it’s not just rock-and-roll.

This type of soul, this type of art takes a while to cook. It’s like when my wife cooks for me and I always ask for greens. She never wants to cook the greens because they take three hours to cook.

I cry out for order and find it only in art.

Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it’s right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of…recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it.

If you hold onto the beauty and inspiration and the clarity that is music, you will have an anchor, you will not be too far swayed by what the world is.