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.

Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not.

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

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.

Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain.

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.