Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.

The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

Avant-gardism is an addiction that can be appeased only by a revolution in permanence.

The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are.

Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work.