My work is all that I think about because I spent so many years not doing anything. Therefore, work pleases me, which is success in itself.
Category Archive: July 23
I hate having my picture taken. Ten years ago, I stopped having a good side.
I had to make my history quick because there would be no future, merely a gossamer world blown about on the zeitgeist, till zeitgeist, the wind of the times, is blasted away by kamikaze, the wind of God.
I don’t have a philosophy in a nutshell; I would go on and on too much.
I want my soldiers – I mean artists – to be young and strong, with tireless energy performing impossible feats of cunning and bravura.
Charles James was a dear friend of mine when I was a little boy – 17, 18. He was mad as a hatter. I had no idea how famous he was.
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.
You don’t know how pretty you are when you’re young. Just being young is beautiful. And I was astonishingly pretty – you know, very skinny.
I asked someone once why he liked Jean-Michel’s work and why it was being singled out for acclaim, and he said, ‘Because it looks like art.’ But then again, art doesn’t always look like art at first. The way the space shuttle that lifts off doesn’t much resemble the space shuttle as it lands.
I see that the path of progress has never taken a straight line, but has always been a zigzag course amid the conflicting forces of right and wrong, truth and error, justice and injustice, cruelty and mercy.