“The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.”

Live your Art. Don’t think about it.

Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity… but theres a feeling that life is interconnected, that theres life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.

There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren’t sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don’t cry: you scream, you try to run. When it’s over and you’re OK, that’s when you cry.

People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.

Today, basically, on Wall Street, the big money is made by taking risks.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

Everything we could call the contextualizing information. Representing that information is going to be the main issue in the years ahead – how the world meets the mind, not the eye.

It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That’s a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge.

When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional – a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful.

I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.

In the mid- to late ’60s to the mid-’70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

I don’t believe in originality in art. I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We’re always borrowing.

The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.

I love Adele so much and it’s honestly not because we’re both big.

I, Binyavanga Wainaina, quite honestly swear I have known I am a homosexual since I was five.

No, I don’t do drugs anymore, either. But I’ll tell you something about drugs. I used to do drugs, but I’ll tell you something honestly about drugs, honestly, and I know it’s not a very popular idea, you don’t hear it very often anymore, but it is the truth,

It’s one thing believing in yourself, it’s another thing having other people believe in you, and that is the greatest gift, honestly.

It overwhelmed me and tore at my heart and my stomach and my head and it pulled me under, and I couldn’t bear it. I honestly thought I couldn’t bear it.

Honesty of thought and speech and written word is a jewel.

Honestly, I haven’t the time to read contemporary writers. I know this is awful, but in the main it is true.

I honestly believe I am the only woman in the United States who ever traveled throughout the country with a nursing baby to make political speeches.