Works of art... do not force meanings on their audience; meaning emerges, adds up, unfolds from their imagined centres... takes one through the process of discovering meaning.

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public

It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

For the machine meant the conquest of horizontal space. It also meant a sense of that space which few people had experienced before – the succession and superimposition of views, the unfolding of landscape in flickering surfaces as one was carried swiftly past it, and an exaggerated feeling of relative motion (the poplars nearby seeming to move faster than the church spire across the field) due to parallax. The view from the train was not the view from the horse. It compressed more motifs into the same time. Conversely, it left less time in which to dwell on any one thing.

There's no geist like the Zeitgeist.