Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social goals.

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

Life is a stage: perform your masterpiece.

The more 'otter it is, the more 'otter otters likes it

I can accept the theory of relativity as little as I can accept the existence of atoms and other such dogmas.

Wear audacious underwear under the most solemn business attire.

Pop stars should not eat.

The entire room was so yellow that it looked like the sun had thrown up on the walls and wiped its mouth afterward on the dresser and curtains. ---Cole

The most important thing you will do is yet to be seen. For me, I found my important thing to do when I learned to do surgery on the eye, when I learned to restore a person's vision.

It's mandatory in this day and age to be considered to have a sense of humor and to demonstrate it. You're not paying me for a joke, You're paying me for the right joke.

I would like to do a novel where some curse turns that into how the world really is - a blessing or a curse, I don't know which.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.