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

Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.

Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social goals.

Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist Church.

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 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.

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