A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.

Art teachers are always the doormats of the previous generation.

I do have pleasure when I'm writing. I mean, I'm aware of pleasure. And sometimes I make myself laugh, with a joke or something; or I feel gleeful.

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

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.

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

You don't need everybody to agree with you, but you do need a few people. And by this point I have a fairly high degree of confidence in my judgment, in that I don't doubt my sanity; or, even if I do, I don't have to be reassured.