Maybe philosophy - I love talking about ideas. Or maybe art history. I was thinking about psychology, then I got really afraid because everybody says it's terribly boring.

I have had this longstanding interest in going back to school to get a Ph.D. in art history. I was especially interested in exploring this idea of the ecstatic impulse in an artist.

I do have a tendency to want to go back to school at all times in my life. Maybe I'll do the Ph.D. in art history when I'm 50, or maybe divinity school. I like teaching, too.

After I finished school I wanted to do a bunch of courses - art history in Florence, fashion in London and acting in Los Angeles. So I started with acting, and soon I knew this is it, this is what I need to do.

I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.

When I turned 30, due to my father's heart history and my family genetics, I vowed to start seeing a cardiologist every year and just really be proactive and take my own heart health into my own hands.

Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts.

I liked art history. Also liked the gender ratio, especially compared to applied math and physics.

Basically, I was always very interested in comedy, but I was much more sort of academic. And then, after college, loaded with my art history degree, I decided to go work at Comedy Central as a temp.

I tried without much success to learn a little of the humanities and the arts, but even passing the courses in art history and music history was a challenge.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.

My introduction to art history was like everybody else's. You see an art history book that has works by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Yes, these things are great. But I don't see a reflection of myself in any of these things I'm looking at.

I attended a middling high school in central Virginia in the mid-'90s, so there were no lofty electives to stoke my artistic sensibility - no A.P. art history or African-American studies or language courses in Mandarin or Portuguese. I lived for English, for reading.

Take Damien Hirst out of contemporary art history, and there's an incredible void. Great artists, like great people, have second acts.

I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.

I majored in art history. But I took theater classes, and every semester I was in college productions.

I'd love to go off to college to study photography, art history, humanities.

Studying art history is actually one of the few ways of getting a good job in the arts sector. It's hard to be a museum curator without it, work in any senior position in an auction house or gallery, or become a serious art critic.

A contemporary artist like Grayson Perry is brilliant partly because of his expert knowledge of art history, not despite it.

'The Art of the Brick' is an exhibition I've done where I've taken some works of art from art history and replicated them all out of Lego bricks.

I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious.

My family always encouraged my drawing ability. Kids in school who teased me about my reading would get out of their seats and stand behind my desk as I worked and go, 'Wow, you can really draw.' Later, I earned a degree in Fine Art and got a Ph.D. in Art History.

Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.

I believe in originality, primarily. However, it's important to know what there has been before to aim in that direction. Art history informs us. It informs our mind. I like to look at books, exhibitions, paintings, as a computer, subconsciously taking on information.

I did art history and English literature at Newcastle.

I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.

Cinemascope has become synonymous with 'epic,' and absolutely if you're shooting armies and certain kinds of vast landscapes, you do want that panoramic canvas to work on. But if you look at art history there's not a whole lot of epic paintings that are in that aspect ratio.

There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.

The visual information of art history is going to students seamlessly, without the enormous trouble those of us who are older had when we studied art history many years ago.