John Constable Quotes

I think people who sample are cheating. It is like people who do collages. Use all of your own stuff.

It makes me happy to think that this world of art-as-investment is a minuscule fraction of the art world overall. Most people who create, trade and own art do it for a much simpler reason. They just like it.

I don't know a single collector or museum director who says: 'Oh, he's on a list, so I think I'll buy something of his.' The people who buy my art put a little more thought into it than that.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

Most museums in Moscow, like Tretyakov, were established by philanthropists, whose passion for art allowed the development of culture on many levels.

I buy some art but I don't like to talk about it.

I pledge allegiance to the living, and I will defend art from history. I will rescue art from the future, from its attrition into taste, and from the speculative notion that it will become more valuable with time.

I don't want nobody to ever say, 'I coulda done that beat' or 'I know where you got that from.'

No artist wants to be perceived as a regurgitator.

It may be a point of great pride to have a Van Gogh on the living room wall, but the prospects of having Van Gogh himself in the living room would put a great many devoted art lovers to rout.

It wasn't that I amassed it with aims of selling it and becoming a rich man. My personality demanded that I be surrounded by the best examples of the world's art.

Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. What matters and survives is the art. I buy art that I like. I buy it to show it off in exhibitions. Then, if I feel like it, I sell it and buy more art.

I collect a lot of art.

An art book is a museum without walls.

Even though other people wrote my songs I put my stamp on them. I have a connection, but there is no truer connection than an artists and their own song.

Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.

I think that the first part of the art is making the art, but when art really becomes art is when it belongs to somebody else.

It's sort of a law of the art world: The stuff that grows in importance is only the stuff you bought because it wowed you.

My contemporary art collection began with just needing to put things on the wall. I was looking around my Victorian house thinking, 'What would be the coolest is contemporary art - it will make me look young and interesting.' I'm more than 80 percent skeptical of the whole thing.

Nobody really needs a painting. It's something you kind of create value for in a way that you don't with a company. It's an act of collective faith what an object is worth. Maintaining that value system is part of what a dealer does, not just making a transaction but making sure that important art feels important.

I do not care to put out any ideas for pictures. They are too valuable and can be appropriated by any art student, defrauding me out of a possible picture.

If you go for the money first and try to think of what other people want to see, you change your original inspiration and perhaps put out something that's less original and less personal and maybe less satisfying.

I have a lot of art in the house, but it's mine, friends'. Not necessarily - like, I didn't spend thousands of dollars to attain it. It's authentic, at least.

And I don't want people to think that I make movies based on other films.

I have a study at the back of the house, overlooking our garden. It's tiny, just wide enough to fit my desk in. The walls are covered with pin boards and art postcards from galleries all over the world, including Tate, MoMA, and Lenbachhaus.