The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Hold'em is a game of calculated aggression. If your cards are good enough for you to call a bet, they are good enough to raise with.

The better the artist, the more vulnerable he seems to be.

The point is that it looks like gambling because the language of the game is money.

I absolutely don't believe in anything. Full stop. Including luck.

Despair, in short, seeks its own environment as surely as water finds its own level.