If you're smart, you abandon the things that didn't work out so well, and you enlarge upon the things that seem to be successful.

If I saw the art around me that I liked, then I wouldn't do art.

I go back and forth between wanting to be abundantly simple and maddeningly complex.

I think art, if it's meaningful at all, is a conversation with other artists. You say something, they say something, you move back and forth.

Talent is cheap, you have to be possessed or obsessed, rather. You really have to feel like you cannot not do art, and that is something you can't will.

Look at the subject as if you have never seen it before. Examine it from every side. Draw its outline with your eyes or in the air with your hands, and saturate yourself with it.

I will not make anymore boring art.

A TWO-DIMENSIONAL SURFACE WITHOUT ANY ARTICULATION IS A DEAD EXPERIENCE

I don't try to be funny. It's just that I feel the world is a little bit absurd and off-kilter and I'm sort of reporting.

Well, why is this art? Why isn't that art?

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

Walter Parmenter sometimes seemed to his daughter a restless subterranean force held together by rituals.

Age has a good mind and sorry shanks.

Atheism is aristocratic the idea of a great Being that watches over oppressed innocence and punishes triumphant crime is altogether popular.

You know, I've never killed a man before. I mean I droped bombs on the enemy from the above, but never face to face. [thinking pause] I don't see what the big deal is - I really don't.

I usually try to write through pain and end up digging myself into a deeper hole.

A pioneer is not someone who makes her own soap. She is one who takes up her burdens and walks toward the future.

A leader is someone who demonstrates what's possible.

As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves and rarely understood others. Experience was of no ethical value. It was merely the name men gave to their mistakes.

The bold may not live long, but the timid never live at all.

The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties.