Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

There's art that I would readily buy if I could afford it, and enjoy, but would never write about because it doesn't seem significant.

The problem of making artists talk about their work is that when they're making their work the left-brain is shut off. So if you talk to an artist about it, you're talking to someone who wasn't there. It's hopeless.

There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.

My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

You could say that clinical depression is an incapacity to aesthetic response. It's like there's a constant agreement within ourselves, a kind of mutual understanding between ourselves and the world.