When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

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

Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

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.

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.

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

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