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.

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.

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.

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.

I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.