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.

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

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

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

Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time-while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works-but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

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.