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.

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

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.

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.

To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

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