Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque "Wilbur," thereby becoming "Orville" in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation.

For Rembrandt, reality is role-playing.... Everyone is portrayed in relation to a social hierarchy.

Artists are expected to talk about their work but writers aren't expected to talk about their writing.

Beauty is a physiological reaction. Beauty is not an object.

Your medium has to be alive to you, no matter what you do.

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

There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers.