There was a big drive when I was at art school to make you aware of the economy of meaning - after all this was still during the tail end of minimalism. Being responsible for everything you put in your picture and being able to defend it. Keeping everything clear around you so you know what is operating. To open the wound and keep it clean.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

Actually I think Art lies in both directions - the broad strokes big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand that kind of thing.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes in galleries on the walls of auction houses and off the walls in museum storage.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures being shown for the first time were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women's magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock a flower the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two it's bad art.

To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten and the more a picture has to give the greater it is.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.

Life is painting a picture not doing a sum.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.

A picture is a poem without words.

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Every man's work whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else is always a portrait of himself.

When I go outside of L.A. no matter where it is really anywhere I go people will be stopping me or taking pictures or whatever it is. And it's great. It's amazing. I'm just lucky.

It's odd because I used to see pictures on telly or wherever of what I now know to be Shaftesbury Avenue and I used to wonder what that amazing street with all the lights was. Well now I know. I think when you get a wee taste of something it maybe isn't what you thought it was.