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

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

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

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.

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.

Now that rates are moving up, we're seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.