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

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.

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.

Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque "Wilbur," thereby becoming "Orville" in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation.

Sometimes just looking into a person's eyes can tell a graphic story and a brilliant novel if you have the ability to turn it into words.

The world is a stage where people come to play their own part and leave, your contribution to making the world a much better place matters.

Our entire life ... consists ultimately in accepting ourselves as we are.

I always wake up early Saturday morning, and I have a little bit more time, so I go to the gym.

The American taxpayer should not be treated more shabbily than debtors from other nations and we should be encouraging other nations to help rebuild Iraq's economy.

Is it not meningitis?

Just as all pop music is not simplistic, not all contemporary concert music is complex. Often what a person connects with goes much deeper than generalized issues of simplicity and complexity.

You could afford your house without the government if it weren't for the government.

I'm not ashamed that I need glasses for distance. I did not feel like I needed to have all of that hair, which was typical Star Jones, or the extra lashes or the heavy makeup.

There is no finer sonic-producing weapon for a guitar slayer than a hand crafter Gibson masterpiece.