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

We have entered a period of intolerance which combines, as it sometimes does in America, with a sugary taste for euphemism. This conjunction fosters events that go beyond the wildest dream of satire- if satire existed in America anymore; perhaps the reason for its weakness is that reality has superseded it.

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

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

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

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.

When the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.