The bohemian artist who exists only for his art, it’s a myth. OK, it might have been true for Giacometti, but it certainly wasn’t for Picasso or Mozart.

The most evil person I ever met was a toss-up between Pablo Picasso and the publisher-crook Robert Maxwell.

So many people are exploiting the name Picasso – and, in a way, even the estate is doing it.

‘Matisse and Picasso’ is a little like Plato after Socrates. Socrates only taught in words. He didn’t write. And after that, you had Plato and Aristotle to write about what he had said. I write about them because they didn’t write about them.

I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.

You have to be creative. It’s the basics. You can’t be Picasso unless you know how to draw a real face; then you can turn it upside down.

Like Picasso, I go through blue periods, green periods, or grey periods.

You see Michelangelo and Picasso and you read literature. I had some innate inchoate yearning for that, but I never really saw where I would fit in. That’s called art. And then something happened to pop music, which is that it became art under the hand of the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan and some other people.

By making pictures, you learn the many different properties of photography. I use those properties differently than, say, an advertising agency would, but we’re both operating in the same reality. A face painted by Picasso occupies the same reality as a portrait by Stieglitz.

Only once in a thousand years or so do we get to hear a Mozart or see a Picasso or read a Shakespeare. Ali was one of them, and yet at his heart, he was still a kid from Louisville who ran with the gods and walked with the crippled and smiled at the foolishness of it all.

Picasso is what is going to happen and what is happening; he is posterity and archaic time, the distant ancestor and our next-door neighbor. Speed permits him to be two places at once, to belong to all the centuries without letting go of the here and now.

I was going to have cosmetic surgery until I noticed that the doctor‘s office was full of portraits by Picasso.

I’m sick of the foodies who need every morsel that goes into their mouth to be a Picasso painting, a Giacometti sculpture, a Proust novel, evoking the world with each crumb.

Most artists never get a chance to be Picasso, but that doesn’t mean you would stop painting.

I love the work of Matisse and Picasso, but I don’t have enough millions to own one. And I don’t really believe in owning art, anyway.

I love what Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and Jesus all said – that love is really the driving principle of the creative act. In fact, they would say that great art is always inspired by love.

That’s the miracle of music. No one can reinterpret a Picasso, but a song can be remixed and covered and interpreted in an infinite number of ways. It’s a living thing.

Turns out Picasso’s passion for uncertainty, mystery, and the thrill of life never ended.

Bitcoin, in the short or even long term, may turn out be a good investment in the same way that anything that is rare can be considered valuable. Like baseball cards. Or a Picasso.

When you see the best of the best – when you see a Matisse or a Picasso – what interests you is the creativity and harmony.

I was literally told for ‘The Show Goes On‘ that I shouldn’t rap too deep. I shouldn’t be too lyrical. It just needs to be something easy on the eyes. Like a record company telling Picasso that we don’t need these abstract interpretations of life, where people have to sit down and look at it and break it down.

I look at people like Picasso and Da Vinci and Escher and Miles Davis, and they’ll write or paint that one definitive masterpiece of maybe 50 that they have that’s really trying to go outside the box, trying to do something that’s tough. And then when you accomplish it, you look back and go, ‘Yeeaaaah – masterpiece.’

Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.

The true symbolism of every facet of ‘Guernica‘ can only be guessed at, but we do know that it haunted Picasso.

Computers let people avoid people, going out to explore. It’s so different to just open a website instead of looking at a Picasso in a museum in Paris.

I said, I don’t want to paint things like Picasso’s women and Matisse’s odalisques lying on couches with pillows. I don’t want to paint people. I want to paint something I have never seen before. I don’t want to make what I’m looking at. I want the fragments.

Imagine if someone like John Lennon or Bob Marley, Sid Vicious, Picasso, whomever, were doing their work, and some corporation, some CEO, some branding entity was saying to you, ‘Well, you can do that, but you’ve got to remove this aspect of your work.’ There would no longer be that purity anymore.

I remember my mother taking me to see the Picasso show in the 1940s, and I was impressed by the life and vibrancy of it all. It was a bit too avant-garde for most Londoners at the time, but since then, the city has become a centre for modern culture.

There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Mir= and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.

Valentino made my day suit for the wedding of Paloma Picasso in Paris.

When I was a child, my mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general. If you become a monk, you’ll end up as the Pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Picasso’s always been such a huge influence that I thought when I started the cartoon paintings that I was getting away from Picasso, and even my cartoons of Picasso were done almost to rid myself of his influence.

I could have been born into any family. I was fortunate that I was born to an artist as extraordinary as Picasso, and Picasso turned out to be the family business.

Picasso’s sculpture has incredible strength combined with a lack of pomposity.

If they were starting their careers today, Rockwell and Picasso would probably both be painting on black velvet.

Everything will be all right – you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction and see it as a drawing they made themselves.

I’m not going to talk about Picasso. I have done my duty to those memories. I have had a great career as an artist myself, you know. I’m not here just because I’ve spent time with Picasso.

If I say ‘Find me an interesting painting’ to Google, someday a robot could go around the Picasso museum and take a picture for me.

To model yourself after Steve Jobs is like, ‘I’d like to paint like Picasso, what should I do? Should I use more red?’

I think Picasso was someone who took art’s powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That’s something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now.

Pablo Picasso first entered my consciousness when I was a boy of about eight years old.

I came down successfully through Picasso and Braque, down through Pollock, I guess, but I began to stop at Franz Kline and the Abstractionists. I like their design, brilliant design, marvelous color layers. But I don’t find any human content there. I’m from an old school, and painting has to have human content for me.

I don’t think that I’m over his influence but they probably don’t look like Picassos; Picasso himself would probably have thrown up looking at my pictures.

I would like to know what politicians eat on the campaign trail, what Picasso ate in his pink period, what Walt Whitman ate while writing the verse that defined America, what mid-westerners bring to potlucks, what is served at company banquets, what is in a Sunday dinner these days, and what workers bring for lunch.

Pablo Picasso, Frank Sinatra, Ernest Hemingway, Mel Gibson, Lou Reed, Norman Mailer, Vanessa Redgrave, Van Morrison – each is distinguished by controversies unrelated to his or her art; by many accounts, some of them are not nice people at all.

Since childhood, it was my dream to go where all the poets and artists had been. Rimbaud, Artaud, Brancusi, Camus, Picasso, Bresson, Goddard, Jeanne Moreau, Juliette Greco, everybody – Paris for me was a Mecca.

When I was 12, I wrote a list of things to do before I died. ‘Own a Picasso’ was one of those things.

I thought it would be very nice to become Picasso or Rembrandt, or a van Gogh.

What if Picasso had gone to the Moon? Or Andy Warhol or Michael Jackson or John Lennon? What about Coco Chanel? These are all artists that I adore.

High tech is for a short time. But art is forever. People still admire a Picasso or a Van Gogh. But they don’t admire the steam locomotive anymore.

Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don’t think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius.

‘Painting like a child’ isn’t a negative for me… it’s something only great artists can really achieve. The childlike quality of some of Picasso’s drawings is precisely what makes them so masterful and extraordinary; the ability to express complete visions, feelings and portraits through a continuous line.

Picasso said, ‘Art is a lie that tells the truth.’ What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say ‘pass the mustard‘.

I don’t happen to approve of plastic surgery. I think God put plastic surgeons on this earth for good reasons – people get burned or people might have a nose like Pinocchio and that has to be fixed. But to just chop yourself up to look a few years younger? You could come out looking like a Picasso picture.

My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

I don’t write for a particular audience. I work as an artist, and I think the audience of one, which is the self, and I have to satisfy myself as an artist. So I always say that I write for the same people that Picasso painted for. I think he painted for himself.

Throughout my life, there are four people I’ve met who were truly original people. The other three were Groucho Marx, Jim Morrison, and Pablo Picasso.

Pablo Picasso was generous. But he always signed and dedicated his gifts even when he knew that people would sell them because they needed the money.

When I was 13 years old, I went to visit my aunt and uncle in Washington, D.C., and they just deposited me at the National Gallery. I would go from Rembrandt to Picasso – I remember that experience so vividly.

My heroes were Dylan, John Lennon and Picasso, because they each moved their particular medium forward, and when they got to the point where they were comfortable, they always moved on.

I don’t think there is any question that Picasso is the greatest figure of the 20th century.

I always dreamed of working in Paris, of going to the Coupole and slapping Picasso or Giacometti on the shoulder.

I was always struck by how Picasso had no interest in music.

Picasso once remarked I do not care who it is that has or does influence me as long as it is not myself.

I doubt Picasso ever painted a picture in an hour, he took his time, looked at every detail and made sure it was perfect.