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.

Being in love is dangerous because you talk yourself into thinking you've never had it so good.

I do work hard at trying to find the right expression for something, which might be like finding the right image - choosing not only the right words but down to the right number of lines. I remember being in Maine once at Colby College with Alex Katz. It houses hundreds of his works. There was a painting of just one seagull against a blue sky. I was admiring it and Alex said, "45 brush strokes exactly."

People talk about this often in the art world. The press releases have reached a level of absurdity and creativity - creative absurdity - that has completely detached from its intended object. It's left reality behind long ago. It's like something out of William Burroughs.

If you go to a concert, you will notice, is it loud? Is the music fast? Is it predominately strings or brass? There are things we can all register, whether we are musicians or not. Painting's no different. Taking pleasure in projecting oneself into the painting is the act of looking. That's what looking is.

I'm always very grateful for stories about the great coffeehouse wits in Vienna at the turn of the last century. People would wait for a chance to stand near the table where the great wits were trading witticisms as a spectator sport because it was that good. They were that on fire and there was no product. They didn't write anything down. It was just the pleasure of engagement with the moment. I think that's my kind of ideal of how I live.

I think it's what any artist would want: to feel like their work can be taken in on a level of experience beyond the headline or the press release. I don't think any artist wants to be reduced to a press release. We have a whole industry whose function it is to process and present information. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not the thing.