The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism.

Why wait for a call when you have a command?

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.