All artists and creative people are basically unhappy people. If you were happy, that would mean you were content with the world as it was and why would you ever want to change it?

Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa.

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

You could say that clinical depression is an incapacity to aesthetic response. It's like there's a constant agreement within ourselves, a kind of mutual understanding between ourselves and the world.

What I want to know from students, and I ask them right away, is, 'What do you want? I don't care what it is. I want to help you get it.

I can do pretty good work in various short forms, but anything over 1400 words, I'd be of no use. I like to say I'm a river navigator. I need to see the shore behind the shore.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance.

Everything is a product of time because it took a particular period of time to achieve that result

Your eyes show you only what is in front of you

-I was young! I made a mistake, okay! Haven’t you ever made a mistake?-I’m old! Of course I’ve made mistakes, you stupid little shit!

War is just when it is necessary arms are permissible when there is no hope except in arms.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

When the Supreme Court says baseball isn't run like a business, everybody jumps up and down with joy. When I say the same thing, everybody throws pointy objects at me.

Freedom is indivisible, and either we are working for freedom or you are working for the sake of your self-interests and I am working for mine.

Does our culture have a need for violence? I don't know. I guess it's a personal thing.

That was the best ice-cream soda I ever tasted.

Running is the greatest metaphor for life, because you get out of it what you put into it.