The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

No art goes unmediated by other art.

Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.

America is a construction of mind, not of race or inherited class or ancestral territory.

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.