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

It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.

Why wait for a call when you have a command?

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

On the whole, money does artists much more good than harm. The idea that one benefits from cold water, crusts and debt collectors is now almost extinct, like belief in the reformatory power of flogging.

It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

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.