The artist usually sets out -- or used to -- to point a moral and adorn a tale. The tale, however, points the other way, as a rule. Two blankly opposing morals, the artist's and the tale's. Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper functions of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.

I think New Mexico was the greatest experience from the outside world that I have ever had.

Oh the innocent girl in her maiden teens knows perfectly well what everything means.

For, of course, being a girl, one’s whole dignity and meaning in life consisted in the achievement of an absolute, a perfect, a pure and noble freedom. What else did a girl’s life mean?

Sing then the core of dark and absolute oblivion where the soul at last is lost in utter peace.

I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories.

Europe's the mayonnaise all right, but America supplies the good old lobster.