To me, the greatest artists are almost entirely non-verbal.

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.

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

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

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.

Kicking the door shut with the heel of my boot, I wedge her against it, raining kisses on her skin, wishing I could climb inside her and kiss away the welts left on her heart and mind.

Any life truly lived is a risky business and if one puts up too many fences against the risks one ends by shutting out life itself.

Knowlede is power and Absolute Knowledge is Absolute Power or the Power of Truth, which is constantly shaping events and circumstances to reveal the errors in our beliefs.

I just want to live like a full-time tourist, to show up at the airport, pick a destination, walk up to the counter and say, 'Do you have any first-class seats?'

There are only two reasons to sit in the back row of an airplane: Either you have diarrhea, or you're anxious to meet people who do.

That which does not kill me, has made a grave tactical error.

In art, the best is good enough.

It is a major sin to break a contract, especially in military situations.

I'm not performing now. What I do now is listen to music all day long. Listening is very nourishing to me. I might go back to perform, I might make another record. I've got a record half finished.

Have you ever been in love? Stay well clear. It leaves you very bitter and very twisted.