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.

The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.

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.

I want to be able to be alone, to find it nourishing - not just a waiting.

Loeb has been doing wonderfully patient work, exploring the American conscience from the inside. I regard him as something of a national treasure.

Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.