Rene Ricard

“Charles James was a dear friend of mine when I was a little boy - 17, 18. He was mad as a hatter. I had no idea how famous he was.”

“I want my soldiers - I mean artists - to be young and strong, with tireless energy performing impossible feats of cunning and bravura.”

“My work is all that I think about because I spent so many years not doing anything. Therefore, work pleases me, which is success in itself.”

“To support myself as a kid, I was a model at art schools around Boston.”

“I pledge allegiance to the living, and I will defend art from history. I will rescue art from the future, from its attrition into taste, and from the speculative notion that it will become more valuable with time.”

“I honestly don't need much money. People love to buy me drinks. Hostesses love to feed me. Famous artists lavish me with expensive artworks, and heiresses do the same with jewels that I promptly lose.”

“Women are really beautiful in their forties, and men seem to come of age around the period of their second wife.”

“You don't know how pretty you are when you're young. Just being young is beautiful. And I was astonishingly pretty - you know, very skinny.”

“I had to make my history quick because there would be no future, merely a gossamer world blown about on the zeitgeist, till zeitgeist, the wind of the times, is blasted away by kamikaze, the wind of God.”

“I should be paid to go out. You see, I'm good for business. I class up a joint.”

“I don't have a philosophy in a nutshell; I would go on and on too much.”

“I hate having my picture taken. Ten years ago, I stopped having a good side.”

“I asked someone once why he liked Jean-Michel's work and why it was being singled out for acclaim, and he said, 'Because it looks like art.' But then again, art doesn't always look like art at first. The way the space shuttle that lifts off doesn't much resemble the space shuttle as it lands.”