Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends.

Creative Writing was not a form of psychotherapy, in ways both sublime and ridiculuous, it clearly was, precisely that.

I don't like gurus. I don't like people who ask you to follow or believe. I like people who ask you to think independently.

Do I do as false prophets do and puff air into simulacra? Am I a Sorcerer--like Macbeth's witches--mixing truth and lies in incandescent shapes? Or am I a kind of very minor scribe of a prophetic Book--telling such truth as in me lies, with aid of such fiction as I acknowledge mine, as Prospero acknowledged Caliban.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.