Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.