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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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