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

Once established, a successful style looks like an inevitability - maybe that's the definition of a successful style - but there's often the time when it looks like anything but.

To know how to structure the joke perfectly so that the narrative information is given in the right tempo, in just the right dose - it sometimes takes quite a lot of work. It seems easy when you hear the joke.

No one's quite figured out how to make the images come to the viewer. I guess if they put it on a conveyor belt, you could stand in one place like at sushi restaurants. That could be a next generation of museums. Someone should try that. I think ideally you want to have a contemplative space for the viewer. And shuffling around like a chain gang does work against that.

There was a review by Fairfield Porter from the 1950s about Mark Rothko, one of the more hallowed names in American art. Porter says something like, "Yeah, Rothko paints rectangles of color. They have mass but no weight." That's not in any way a detraction, but it's a description. And it has nothing to do with the spiritual dimension. The main thing is as an intelligent viewer, to identify just what those things are that it does, that those rectangles do, and then not assume that they do these things over here. I don't know why that's challenging.

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

I've always read, I've always admired writers and was lucky really to meet some extraordinary ones and become friends. Certain times you just like people, and it grows out like a nautilus shell.