I've just finished my 20th book this past year and I'm working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I'll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I'm an artist too.

I had some money I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive worked a lot took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.

I love getting my nails done. My mom's best friend is a manicurist. When I was little she'd do little paintings on my nails like flowers.

I like eating out. I like buying beautiful paintings and being surrounded by beautiful things. I have to finance that life. I can barely afford a pension scheme because I don't make enough money.

I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself and the paintings appear as in a dream.

I learn my lines while on the golf course. I try to do two or three things at once. I have ideas for books all the time I have ideas for paintings all the time and I write them all down. I take my sketchpad and my iPad which I design on and I do sit down and do specific tasks at specific times.

The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.

People who put my paintings on their walls are putting their values on their walls: faith family home a simpler way of living the beauty of nature quiet tranquillity peace joy hope. They beckon you into this world that provides an alternative to your nightly news broadcast.

I am a great lover of art in many forms: paintings objets textiles. I don't have the talent for painting but I have a very good sense of colour a love of visual beauty.

I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings and every time I look at them I see something different.

One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It's why he found shooting on set boring - because he had already composed the film in his head.

At the beginning of the 20th century the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music which was then considered as the noblest art.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression whether they are paintings sculptures tragedies or musical compositions.

Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public out in the open.

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations large paintings and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs photographs of advertising sculpture with ready-made objects videos using already-existing film.

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.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue but I've done many.

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem with each painting being a single stanza.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

All still lifes are actually paintings of the world on the sixth day of creation when God and the world were alone together without man!