Government money in the arts, I fear, can only deflect artists from their responsibility to find an authentic market for their products.

Rain is grace; rain is the sky descending to the earth; without rain, there would be no life.

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives.

Now that I am sixty, I see why the idea of elder wisdom has passed from currency.

A cynic is a kind of romantic who has aged.

How circumstantial reality is! Facts are like individual letters, with their spikes and loops and thorns, that make up words: eventually they hurt our eyes, and we long to take a bath, to rake the lawn, to look at the sea.

The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else.