I feel very fortunate to have known James Salter, not very well, but I knew him over the years. Always, people would be talking, talking, talking, and after digging themselves into a deep enough hole, they would turn to Jim and wait for him to utter the single clarifying sentence.

Spend a day talking only in rhyme.

I think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's in a museum doesn't mean it's anything.

I have a terrible confession to make, sort of like those people who say that they've been mispronouncing a word all their life: I've never read Ways of Seeing all the way through. I'm sure I carried it around with me in art school.

People tend to remember and mentally classify work according to how it looks, sometimes oblivious to the underlying intent.

Fairfield Porter who has been my model for art writing all along, said that if the most interesting thing about a work of art is its content, it's probably a failure. I think it's true that if you find yourself thinking about the meaning in an author's message, it's probably not very interesting as art. Obviously, this is a tough concept, because if you withdraw intention.

For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.