An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

Christmas began in the heart of God. It is complete only when it reaches the heart of man.Why wait for a call when you have a command?

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.

In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.

There is virtue in virtuosity, especially today, when it protects us from the tedious spectacle of ineptitude.

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

Drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies – the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about – is apparently immortal.