Leonard Baskin

The art schools... you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it.

But I think doctors have always been either honest or dishonest.

I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money.

I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.

I think the leaders inevitably express the people they are leading.

There is, however, a change going on in the world. There's far more interest in drawing now than there has been in a long, long time. Schools are beginning to teach drawing again in a serious and meaningful way.

Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.

Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.

I think if you touch ordinary people, they're simply ordinary people, the way they've always been. They work hard, they don't have really as much as they should.

I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.