In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

Why wait for a call when you have a command?

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public

Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.

It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.

the way to create art is to burn and destroyordinary concepts and to substitute themwith new truths that run down from the top of the headand out of the heart

While I am busy with little things I am not required to do greater things.

I always find beauty in things that are odd and imperfect - they are much more interesting.

You should not be misled about the so-called single opposition candidate. There are so many of them now that you will lack the fingers to count them.

It is an error to suppose that a man belongs to himself. No man does. He belongs to his wife, or his children, or his relations, or to his creditors, or to society in some form or other.

Whatever principle of intelligence we attain in this life, it will rise with us in the resurrection.

Some people need a fig-leaf on their mouths.

Sin brought death, and death will disappear with the disappearance of sin.

What they were doing was extremely wrong as far as I was concerned, and to this day, I don't know what I was thinking except bowl them over.

I don't look too far ahead.