The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

The spirit of the place is a strange thing. Our mechanical age tries to override it. But it does not succeed. In the end the strange, sinister spirit of the place, so diverse and adverse in differing places, will smash our mechanical oneness into smithereens.

Sex is our deepest form of consciousness. It is utterly non-ideal, non-mental. It is pure blood-consciousness.... It is the consciousness of the night, when the soul is almost asleep.

We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority.

There's lots of good fish in the sea...maybe...but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you're not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

One could laugh at the world better if it didn't mix tender kindliness with its brutality.