Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

The art critics on some of Britain's newspapers could as easily have been assigned gardening or travel, and been cheerfully employed for life.

Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on.

Art collectors are pretty insignificant in the scheme of things. What matters and survives is the art.

Lots of ambitious work by young artists ends up in a dumpster after its warehouse debut. So an unknown artist's big glass vitrine holding a rotting cow's head covered by maggots and swarms of buzzing flies may be pretty unsellable. Until the artist becomes a star. Then he can sell anything he touches .

Artists need a lot of collectors, all kinds of collectors, buying their art.

The fact that in the last 10 years only five of the 40 Turner Prize nominees have been painters tells you more about curators than about the state of painting today.

If you can't take a good kicking, you shouldn't parade how much luckier you are than other people.

When a critic knows what she or he is looking at and writes revealingly about it, it's sublime.

Nobody can give you advice after you've been collecting for a while. If you don't enjoy making your own decisions, you're never going to be much of a collector anyway.

Few people in contemporary art demonstrate much curiosity. The majority spend their days blathering on, rather than trying to work out why one artist is more interesting than another, or why one picture works and another doesn't.

If you study a great work of art, you'll probably find the artist was a kind of genius. And geniuses are different to you and me. So let's have no talk of temperamental, self-absorbed and petulant babies. Being a good artist is the toughest job you could pick, and you have to be a little nuts to take it on. I love them all.

When you see something special, something inspired, you realise the debt we owe great curators and their unforgettable shows - literally unforgettable because you remember every picture, every wall and every juxtaposition.

Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.

I regularly find myself waking up to art I passed by or simply ignored.

Its obvious nonsense, but it makes nice people feel good about themselves to do their bit for the planet. Its vanity of a grotesque kind to believe that mankind, and our carbon footprint, has more impact on the future of Earth than Nature, which bends our planet to its will, as it sees fit.

Be the Worst You Can Be: Life's Too Long for Patience and Virtue