The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

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.

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

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

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.