If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.

People think that the politician is just part of a system, and whether they're lying or not doesn't matter.

People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, "Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?"

Oftentimes people get it wrong when they say we need to educate voters first and then give them power. I tend to favor giving them power first.

One of the most dangerous things about Fox News isn't that it's right wing but that it's nihilistic. It takes away the capacity to believe in politics.

There is a long American tradition of suspicion of concentrated economic power because of its tendency to corrupt government and turn it from a democracy into a plutocracy.

My current goal is to change the way we think about antitrust and anti-monopoly.

I think the reason you see so many people dropping out of politics is because there's an anti-poetic strain in modern political discourse.

New York City is one of the most vulnerable cities in the world to climate change, so I see Keystone as the central threat to New York.

There's a tendency, especially among academics, to see politics as deeply dirty and deeply egotistical.

Creativity is essential to any kind of joyful living. Sometimes I act, sometimes I draw, I paint, I write poems. I can't imagine living without it.

Women are still cats and birds. Or at the best, cows.

PROBOSCIS, n. The rudimentary organ of an elephant which serves him in place of the knife-and-fork that Evolution has as yet denied him. For purposes of humor it is popularly called a trunk.

By self-analysis you can not change your character, but you may change your mentality.

The one thing you'll notice when you're walking through Harlem is every single passing car is playing different music and there's also music that's being played out of windows.

Kino-Eye uses every possible means in montage, comparing and linking all points of the universe in any temporal order, breaking, when necessary, all the laws and conventions of film construction.

There hasn't been a more effeminate Jew in the closet since Anne Frank.

He raised his hand in a peaceful gesture. "You need to relax a bit, dove. Like Mouse over there. You trust me, don't you, Mouse?" "Nope!" "Ahhh, I'm hurt. Nobody likes me.

I've always been interested in a lot of the medieval art portraying people being tormented.

I literally felt like a freak, which is another aspect of the role of Sally that I relate to: total outsider.

Literature speaks the language of the imagination, and the study of literature is supposed to train and improve the imagination.