Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?

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.

Dream Song:The heavens Go with me.

have no doubt, this technology will — someday, somewhere — be used to change the genome of our own species in ways that are heritable, forever altering the genetic composition of human kind.

Having in my life been bitten by the jaws of both victory and defeat, I must rush to add that success is to failure as butter pecan ice cream is to death.

The challenge, really, on any new film is to try to avoid that and achieve a few moments that aren't cliche.

Accountability only works if you want it to.

My designs and labors and aspirations are my only friends.

I'd like to be seen as an average Australian bloke. I can't think of... I can't think of a nobler description of anybody than to be called an average Australian bloke.

Every poem that I write is, in a sense, trying to find adequate words for this unspeakable word, around which my entire life turns.

The rule for finding plots for character-centered novels, which is to ask: 'So what's the worst possible thing I can do to *this* guy?' And then do it.

Men ever follow willingly a daring leader: most willingly of all, in great emergencies.