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

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence- the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.

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

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

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

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