I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it.

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.

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 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.

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.