I always stayed in tune with my own ambitions and attitudes and I'm still my intractable old self, for better or worse.
There's not an orchestra in the world that doesn't have weaknesses. None of us can play everything well. The repertoire is just too big.
I never learned to ride a bicycle, and it is too late now. I never learned to drive. I never learned to swim.
I've got two girls, and they both make beautiful drawings. One of them really has a gift for the way that she colors around certain lines.
I'm not a dogmatic, purist psychopath. There's an unfair image of me - mean, crazy, hostile. I'm really a very gentle person.
Then I started to do furniture and interiors for a friend and just to get stuff in a magazine, and then slowly started to build up and started to doing exhibitions.
What he imagines evokes nothing imaginary, it evokes the reality of the world that experience and reason treat in a confused manner.
Every true New Yorker believes with all his heart that when a New Yorker is tired of New York, he is tired of life.
If you don't have trouble paying the rent, you have trouble doing something else; one needs just a certain amount of trouble.
But I was in awe of the painters; I mean I was new in New York, and I thought the painting that was going on here was just unbelievable.
If you approach an opera as though it were something that always went a certain way, that's what you get. I approach an opera as though I didn't know it.
There are countless artists whose shoes I am not worthy to polish - whose prints would not pay the printer. The question of judgment is a puzzling one.
It is generally admitted that the most beautiful qualities of a color are in its transparent state, applied over a white ground with the light shining through the color.
This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative; and have been painted in a scale of normal living rather than an institutional scale.
I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted.
His name, even, is part of the marketing scheme, I mean, Thelonious Sphere Monk - how can you think of a better name to fit his style of playing?
People come from a certain generation and a certain whole way of looking at things, and you really do become a prisoner of your own world.
But now I know that it is very important that all buildings should be consistent, that this is the quality of the Gothic cathedral, for instance, that we like.
If you have white walls, human beings look better in a room than if you have red walls.
A lot of people use a smiley face when they write letters. But it's this huge insane compulsion, like 'I'm happy! I swear!' I'm not buying it.
I feel like there's too many paintings left unpainted that I just don't want to take the time away.
