I pick projects according to how fascinating they are to me and it has resulted in a broad reach. My records are actually in five different sports: balloons airplanes airships gliders and sailboats.

God made man to go by motives and he will not go without them any more than a boat without steam or a balloon without gas.

Sometimes comics will make the observation that it's not jokes that are funny it's characters that are funny. And isn't that true! That's why I always kill jokes. I'm terrible at them because I get the joke right but I can't get the character right and it just goes down like a lead balloon.

I had absolutely no idea how I had ballooned during my pregnancy. All I thought about was eating plenty of food to keep my baby healthy.

Men can absent themselves from real life for their art more easily. Women are anchored into the quotidian business of getting food on the table making sure everybody's socks match the soccer gear is ready. I admire idealists but they're usually enabled by someone who holds the tether on their balloon who pays the bills and sweeps up after them.

I've told my children that when I die to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me death is a graduation.

With my daughter we do arts and crafts we read a lot we listen to music and we cut the strings off balloons and bounce them around after birthday parties.

All of Koons's best art - the encased vacuum cleaners the stainless-steel Rabbit (the late-twentieth century's signature work of Simulationist sculpture) the amazing gleaming Balloon Dog and the cast-iron re-creation of a Civil War mortar exhibited last month at the Armory - has simultaneously flaunted extreme realism idealism and fantasy.