Photography is the art of anticipation, not working with memories, but showing their formation. As such, it has relentlessly usurped imaginative and critical prerogatives of older, slower literature and handmade visual art.

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.

It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.

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

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.

I'm absolutely convinced that people cannot look and read at the same time. Not any more than you can kneel and jump at the same time. It's a completely different physiological setting.

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