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.

A lot of writers and artists are like chefs who eat their own cooking in the kitchen and then deliver an empty plate with assurances that it's great.

Rembrandt was way ahead of his time. It's as if he was painting an amateur theatrical, or a professional theatrical, in his studio. It's a kind of performance.

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

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

Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.

The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!