Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

If men do not keep on speaking terms with children, they cease to be men, and become merely machines for eating and for earning money.

Movies are, like sharp sunlight, merciless; we do not imagine, we view.