Learning to fly an airplane taught me a way of thinking, an approach to problem-solving that was applicable and effective. Pilots are very methodical and meticulous, and artists tend not to be.

The conductor is the artistic leader and sometimes cultural arbiter of his or her community. It is their leadership that is looked to and should anything go wrong, they are the persons taking most of the heat.

It's a different era. Our job now is to show leadership and vision and to help the next generation of artists.

I have a very unsatisfactory and incomplete knowledge of Brooklyn and cannot discuss specifically either what you can do here or what possibilities the city shows in an artistic way. I am not a foreigner but coming here as I do after a long stay abroad, I think things here strike me much as they strike a foreigner.

To me, if there is any sort of value added to the accumulation of knowledge over time, then the work of artists should be a reflection of that accumulated value, accumulated knowledge. You have to demonstrate that you have the sophistication to put that into play in the work you're making.

Cultures are never merely intellectual constructs. They take form through the collective intelligence and memory, through a commonly held psychology and emotions, through spiritual and artistic communion.

My goal in my career is to inspire people, is to get my music out there and have people enjoy it, and have people think of me as an inspirational artist.

I would probably work with Drake as he is massively inspirational to me as a writer as well as an artist. If not him, then Susan Boyle!

I will always desire to play with Bruce Springsteen. He's the most inspirational, most dedicated, most committed and most focused artist I've ever seen. I like to be around people like that.

I love a lot of the New York bands, but Patti Smith stands out. I just read 'Just Kids' and it's an inspirational, well-written account of an emerging New York artist in the late seventies.

There have been many different artists that have been inspirational. I suppose the question is directed to what was the reason why I went into fantasy illustration.

Lady Gaga is the present and the future. She is the most revolutionary and inspirational artist. She is fearless and daring.

Inside, I've got a real purist desire and dream about the music. I like the idea of being able to carve out a kind of magical, colourful, artistic, inspirational life. And the reality just turns out to be quite different, working with the business to bring this thing you have created into the world.

We work to create a new wave of feminism that is more inclusive. I want others to feel equal. It's so great to see women in positions of power, which is why other artists, such as Marilyn Minter, are so inspirational to me.

I am very conscious of who I am as an artist and as an inspirational person.

My tastes and inspirational artists were always rather eclectic and diverse.

Financial independence could be one of the factors, but most 65 plus artistes in our industry wish to continue working for the passion they have for their craft.

In my day, the only people who achieved real independence were my father, Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin, who, with D. W. Griffith, formed United Artists. Other than that, everybody belonged to the big studios. They had no say in their own careers.

I made a real specific decision when I came out of school and most artists were writing about home - if you were a woman, you were writing about being a woman - and I decided not to do that, write about what you know. That's not what I do. I went as far away from home as possible in terms of the development of my imagination.

There's not one major greatest influence on my career. It would be film and great artists and great imagineers - Jim Henson, Walt Disney, Charlie Chaplin, people who understand the joy of the imagination.

I hope that I'm sexy in a different kind of way than I think that a lot of girls are right now. I think a lot of girls in the public eye, especially musical artists, are just kind of objectified a little bit and wearing super-skimpy outfits and leaving nothing to the imagination.

There's no artist in this world that doesn't enjoy the dream that if they have bad reviews now, the story of Keats can redeem them, in their fantasy or imagination, in the future. I think Keats' poem 'Endymion' is a really difficult poem, and I'm not surprised that a lot of people pulled it apart in a way.

Imagination is not the exclusive appanage of artists, but belongs in varying degrees to all men.

So much of what we do as artists is a combination of personal experience and imagination, and how that all creeps into your work is not so linear.