Dumbing down takes many forms: art that is good for you, museums that flatter you, universities that increase your self-esteem. Culture, after all, is really about you.

The arts, like language, emerged spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value.

Why do humans make art? It's how we evolved.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

The continuous capacity of genius to surpass understanding remains a human constant.

Beauty is nature’s way of acting at a distance.

Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please.

Once kitsch is interpreted ironically, it ceases to be kitsch

Solemnity and a complete absence of irony also mark kitsch.

It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.

Pray daily for your family.

When people go away they vanish, turn to nothing, stop being. They live only in memories, haunting the imagination.

If you have time today, so let's show you some strange stone.

We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.

Most men I do not meet at all, for they seem not to have time; they are busy about their beans.

Infinity is just time on an ego trip.

What I write could only be called poetry because there is no other category to put it.

I can write hundreds of songs on simple power chords.

I know it can be dangerous, but I love racing. I worry my wife, but she knows it's important to me.

I don't see any reason why I should look for someone who never took the trouble to love me.