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

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.

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.

Believe you can, and you're halfway there.

Behavior speaks... When you need money, the church tells you to pray. When the church needs money, they pass around a basket.

The fact that you can do something doesn't mean you are called to do it.

Under every stone lurks a politician.

Don't underestimate the value of Doing Nothing

It turns out she is Canadian, my editor, and so she drinks like a fish. So she wasn't a lightweight at all. And in the morning, she said that the idea still seemed like a good one, and here we are.

This Ariyan Eightfold Path, that is to say: Right view, right aim, right speech, right action, right living, right effort, right mindfulness, right contemplation.

Literature and the arts are also criticism in a more particular and practical sense. They embody an expository reflection on, a value judgement of, the inheritance and context to which they pertain.

In all my work, I try to say - 'You may be given a load of sour lemons, why not try to make a dozen lemon meringue pies?'

We expect a great man to be a good reader.