“In China, we don’t have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn’t even have a gallery.”

Hopefully, other successes aren’t like me. It carries much more meaning to other people; my success story is irrelevant. It doesn’t make any sense.

Each year, more people want to become artists.

Today, we jump into this globalization of the economy and the internet age.

Nationality and borders are barriers to our intelligence, to our imagination and to all kinds of possibilities.

I don’t like China. Even today, I still feel I have no emotional relations with this place.

A state like China looks so powerful, but they are so scared of the Internet, so the Internet is more powerful than them.

Even if I have hundreds of things to do, the disconnected feeling is still there because it is very hard to find a real purpose of life.

It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that. There are crises and emergencies all the time, we might not even be aware of some. But I am afraid we’ll have to wait and observe precisely what the government is up to.

It is not an easy job to govern China, I am aware of that.

How to become a really modern society when today we are so – as a human being, we feel so powerful. We have high technology and a superb way of controlling our life. And at the same time, in many ways we are so primitive.

You only have temporary curiosity, amusement, and challenges, but that does not necessarily mean you are really convinced that it’s necessary or that it’s not even worth to do it.

The jobs for 7 million university graduates every year, the immense corruption: Even some Western governments would have to scramble to find solutions to such problems.

Choices after waking up: To be true or to lie? To take action or be brainwashed? To be free or be jailed?

No state or society can claim to have established human rights once and for all.

There’s no such thing as “fixed” culture. China is also becoming more global. Its problems are becoming international problems, becoming German problems, becoming American problems.

It also makes humanity much more safe. If we see pureness somewhere as something to be desired, the trouble starts.

Every living thing tends toward the good or we would have been gone a long time ago

The struggle goes on. The victory is in the struggle, for me. And I accepted that a long time ago.

This is something I learned only too well years ago when I did a fundraiser for Pol Pot. A few years later I saw ‘The Killing Fields,’ and I’ve got to tell you, I just felt like a schmuck.

Approximately four years ago, we were told that Jerry Rice would be a free agent and there were people who felt that he no longer could contribute.

If reality today is different from the reality of 30 years ago, we can’t keep describing reality in the same way as we did 30 years ago.

I don’t know that it was much better thirty years ago. The music industry just wasn’t as efficient.

I actually had less time and the exact same budget on Hairspray, which was few years ago and this is a much bigger movie [then Rock of Ages]. That’s the way studios do it now.

If someone had been asked twenty years ago what direction they thought music was going in, they wouldn’t have said sampling.