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.

Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.

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

Everybody's got plants, but most are just growing weeds. The cultivated have greater gardens, finer and gaudier gardens.

With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.

All artists and creative people are basically unhappy people. If you were happy, that would mean you were content with the world as it was and why would you ever want to change it?

Everything I've learned about art was (a) because I was actually interested, or (b) I was actually interested in covering my ass because of what I was writing about.