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

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

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.

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

I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

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

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.