Because if one is writing novels today concentrating on the beauty of the prose is right up there with concentrating on your semi-colons for wasted effort.

It's such a diversion to be constantly thinking of better ways I can teach people math that my hunger is for that really for new ways of translating the beauty of it.

It seems like the chaos of this world is accelerating but so is the beauty in the consciousness of more and more people.

Accuracy is in every case advantageous to beauty and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other.

People often say that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder ' and I say that the most liberating thing about beauty is realizing that you are the beholder. This empowers us to find beauty in places where others have not dared to look including inside ourselves.

An artist is an artist only because of his exquisite sense of beauty a sense which shows him intoxicating pleasures but which at the same time implies and contains an equally exquisite sense of all deformities and all disproportion.

That which you create in beauty and goodness and truth lives on for all time to come. Don't spend your life accumulating material objects that will only turn to dust and ashes.

I just try to try to keep an attitude that I don't know what I'm doing. Not to the point where I'm beating myself up but I just go in thinking that I have a lot to learn. And I hope I still have that attitude 30 years from now.

I think fun is an important part of the entertainment industry and it should be. Anybody who's not incorporating some of that into their work needs to take a break go away and have an attitude adjustment.

Nothing. We're all friends and friendly. So when the cameras go down depending on the mood or the nature of the material we're dealing with there's usually a kind of a prevailing light attitude that's floating around.

I failed the LSAT. Basically if I had not failed I'd have been a lawyer and there would be no Spanx. I think failure is nothing more than life's way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome but in not trying. It is liberating.

Part of our western outlook stems from the scientific attitude and its method of isolating the parts of a phenomenon in order to analyze them.

I think failure is nothing more than life's way of nudging you that you are off course. My attitude to failure is not attached to outcome but in not trying. It is liberating. Most people attach failure to something not working out or how people perceive you. This way it is about answering to yourself.

In individual industries where female labour pays an important role any movement advocating better wages shorter working hours etc. would not be doomed from the start because of the attitude of those women workers who are not organized.

I was kicked out of school because of my attitude. I was not assimilating. So I went to work taking any jobs I could get.

Madonna remains the most visible performer on the planet as well as one of the wealthiest but would anyone seriously say that artistic self-development is her primary motivating principle? She is too busy with Kabbalah fashion merchandising adoption melodramas the gym and ill-starred horseback riding to study art.

There are so many opportunities in life that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art writing or music.

The art world can be very intimidating because it's just so vast. You talk to people who are really clued in to all the young artists and coming into it you're never going to be able to catch up immediately even though there's pressure to.

I don't think art is propaganda it should be something that liberates the soul provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact transform both and create a third thing.

When money and hype recede from the art world one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.

Much good art got made while money ruled I like a lot of it and hardship and poverty aren't virtues. The good news is that since almost no one will be selling art artists - especially emerging ones - won't have to think about turning out a consistent style or creating a brand. They'll be able to experiment as much as they want.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.