The romantic treatment of death asserts that people were made singular, made more interesting, by their illnesses.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.

Interpretation, based on the highly dubious theory that a work of art is composed of items of content, violates art. It makes art into an article for use, for arrangement into a mental scheme of categories.

The really important thing is not to reject anything.

The work of art itself is . . . a vibrant, magical, and exemplary object which returns us to the world in some way more open and enriched.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Communism is fascism with a human face.