Ignore the awful times, and concentrate on the good ones.

The function of the artist is to make people like life better than they have before.

People don't come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.

You know who was a hero? Franklin Roosevelt.

So I went to New York City to be born again. It was and remains easy for most Americans to go somewhere else and start anew. I wasn't like my parents. I didn't have any supposedly sacred piece of land or shoals of friends to leave behind. Nowhere has the number zero been of more philisophical value than in the United States.... and when the [train] plunged into a tunnel under New York City, with it's lining of pipes and wires, I was out of the womb and into the birth canal.

Human beings will believe in all kinds of things that aren't true, and that's okay. And TV is a part of that.

The painting was framed in a misty view of sky, sea, and valley. Newt's painting was small, black, and warty. It consisted of scratches made in a black, gummy impasto. The scratches formed a sort of spider's web, and I wondered if they might not be the sticky nets of human futility hung up on a moonless night to dry.