The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.

Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.

There are unknown forces in nature; when we give ourselves wholly to her, without reserve, she lends them to us; she shows us these forms, which our watching eyes do not see, which our intelligence does not understand or suspect.

The artist is the confidant of nature, flowers carry on dialogues with him through the graceful bending of their stems and the harmoniously tinted nuances of their blossoms. Every flower has a cordial word which nature directs towards him.

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature.

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

There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.

Whatever the medium, there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials.

There's nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it's a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.

Art should be an oasis: a place or refuge from the hardness of life.

All my life, my girlfriends are always skinny. Beauty in art has nothing to do with beauty in reality. Why do you like primitive art? Because there is beauty in the deformity. Sometimes paintings that people consider realistic are not at all. Raphael figures look realistic, but in real life, they were deformed.

My popularity has to do with the divorce between modern art, where everything is obscure, and the viewer who often feels he needs a professor to tell them whether it's good or not. I believe a painting has to talk directly to the viewer, with composition, color and design, without a professor to explain it.

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

I don't use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

If you want to get laid, go to college. If you want an education, go to the library.

Music is always a commentary on society.

Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid.

There are more love songs than anything else. If songs could make you do something we'd all love one another.

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff.

The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

Art is an investigation.

Dance is the most fundamental of all art forms.

Ultimately there is no such thing as failure. There are lessons learned in different ways.

The only thing I fear more than change is no change. The business of being static makes me nuts.

There's the tradition of the 19th-century ballets, and the 20th century has had a difficult time with that tradition. And it's had a difficult time with many components of the Romantic imagination because of modernism.

In dreams, anything can be anything, and everybody can do. We can fly, we can turn upside down, we can transform into anything.

Schubert had arguably the same melodic gift as Mozart, but even less support. He didn't have the early exposure, never got to travel anywhere, and yet generated and amassed a body of work that grew and developed and is very profound.

We don't need to illustrate music; music illustrates itself.

What I do remember is visualization of the sound of music, seeing bodies in movement in relation to how music sounded, because my mother practiced at the keyboard a lot and I also went to her lessons. As a two year old, three year old I remember seeing things in movement.

Creativity is a habit, and the best creativity is the result of good work habits.

What we want from modern dance is courage and audacity.

I think a sense of humor will help get a girl out of a dark place.

Freedom of speech is, to all Americans, as oxygen is to the human condition. It is a right that has been irreversibly programmed into our hard drive. We are free to speak our minds. An artist's right to express him or herself as best suits their art, is the artist's prerogative and it is guaranteed.

The conventional wisdom with David Mamet is, you do not change a word. And that agrees with me. If you want to change any of David's words, it's like wanting to change the iambic pentameter in Shakespeare - you should do something else.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

Because you know when you first become famous, you start walking a little different because people are staring at you.

It's annoying, but justice and equality are mates. Aren't they? Justice always wants to hang out with equality. And equality is a real pain.

So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality.

You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else.

God is so big. It's a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we're small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

Religion can be the enemy of God. It's often what happens when God, like Elvis, has left the building.

To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.

When a nation is over-reliant on one or two commodities like oil or precious minerals, corrupt government ministers and their dodgy associates hoard profits and taxes instead of properly allocating them to schools and hospitals.

Facebook are an amazing team, a brilliant team. It's a technology that brings people together.

Mandela's heroism is the heroism of a man who suffered so badly for what he thought of as freedom. And yet when he had the upper hand he has this incredible self-control and these incredible leadership qualities.