If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.

If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which for two months every other year new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.

Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism you could remain nonverbal. You don't want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics you wouldn't have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of social 'yak yaks.'

I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends living like starving artists and wonder 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

Dying is an art like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.

I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal also his fine art finally also the only kind of piety he knows his 'divine service.'

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

Opera next to Gothic architecture is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.

I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.

The logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which could be applied universally.

I could have been an architect but I don't think I'd have been very happy. Nearly all modern architecture is a silly game as far as I can see.

Even at the United Nations where legend has it that the building was designed so that there could be no corner offices the expanse of glass in individual offices is said to be a dead giveaway as to rank. Five windows are excellent one window not so great.

Mom and Dad were married 64 years. And if you wondered what their secret was you could have asked the local florist - because every day Dad gave Mom a rose which he put on her bedside table. That's how she found out what happened on the day my father died - she went looking for him because that morning there was no rose.

For a long time I thought I could deal with my anger and hostility on my own. But I couldn't. I denied that it had affected me and yet I was so frantic on the inside with other people: I needed to be constantly reassured.

I don't think I could play a character that I couldn't relate to somehow. I'm not unfamiliar with frustration anger shame helplessness and a load of other emotions that make up our psycho-soup. I try to focus on that frustration that sense of unfairness and multiply it.

Our task of course is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think in fact that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

Imagine a thousand more such daily intrusions in your life every hour and minute of every day and you can grasp the source of this paranoia this anger that could consume me at any moment if I lost control.

But one of the hardest things for me to do was to access anger. I could do it on stage. But when I did it on film it was hard for me. That probably has to do with the intimacy of film. And my own personal issues with expressing anger. So I had to learn how to do that.

On banks I make no apology for attacking spivs and gamblers who did more harm to the British economy than Bob Crow could achieve in his wildest Trotskyite fantasies while paying themselves outrageous bonuses underwritten by the taxpayer. There is much public anger about banks and it is well deserved.