The compulsion to do good is an innate American trait. Only North Americans seem to believe that they always should may and actually can choose somebody with whom to share their blessings. Ultimately this attitude leads to bombing people into the acceptance of gifts.

Americans are the most generous country on the planet. I've worked in Europe I've worked in Australia. There is no where else where you get absolutely no attitude for being a foreigner. If you do your job well they embrace you.

I've got tonnes of aboriginal and Native American art but I'd like even more.

Film in the 20th century it's the American art form like jazz.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries for instance to Africa but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

Abstract Expressionism - the first American movement to have a worldwide influence - was remarkably short-lived: It heated up after World War II and was all but done for by 1960 (although visit any art school today and you'll find a would-be Willem de Kooning).

Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

I like it when somebody tells me a story and I actually really feel that that's becoming like a lost art in American cinema.

You look at the steamboat the railroad the car the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

The American attitude towards efficiency and execution should always underlie architecture.