In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

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

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

Art grows out of modes of perception that make you feel and think...that hooks on to something deep-running in our natures.

The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders.

It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.