I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

Most famous artists are created by their work and the idea of them as a character, and if they're smart and ambitious, they reinforce that character because they want to win. They want their views to prevail.

When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.

With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a professor.

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

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.