“It seems obvious, looking back, that the artists of Weimar Germany and Leninist Russia lived in a much more attenuated landscape of media than ours, and their reward was that they could still belie...”

“It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or scu...”

“Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public”

“Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.”

“The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then ...”

“What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?”

“Everybody was sorta going to sleep twards the end of 1983, and I felt that they had to be woken up!”

“Tonight Must Last Us Forever”

“It's telepathy, over.”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“As a child, my clothes were always tailored to be oversized, because I quickly outgrew them and then needed bigger ones. As an adult, I still don't cut my coat according to size”

“It is not possible to be original by trying to be original - those who attempt this in the arts will be merely avant-garde. Originality is the product of an impulse to intense and overwhelming that...”

“May success chase and find you as you work hard.”