If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods.

All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.

With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer) the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease -- because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses.

The moral pleasure in art, as well as the moral service that art performs, consists in the intelligent gratification of consciousness.

Remember when you hear yourself saying one day that you don't have time anymore to read or listen to music or look at paintings or go to the movies or do whatever feeds your head now. Then you're getting old. That means they got you, after all.

In the United States it's not important which religion you adhere to, as long as you have one.