With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.

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.

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

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.

-Speaking about Vaccinations - "If you accept the truth after the fact, the pain will last a life time.

Writing is a competition between the writer and the page. When the page wins, you fail as a writer.

I think self-exploration is one of the journeys in life that we are blessed to be able to have.

In oratory the will must predominate.

Understand that if a deep desire lives in your heart, a dream that is part of your soul's fiber, a path exists to bring it to life.

I must be doing something right. I've been around for a long time.

Eventually one day I want to direct, but as of right now my next cap that I'm looking for is the producer cap.

Forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging out their things, getting their laundry confused.

[On Senator Everett Dirksen:] His great enemy was boredom and he won every engagement.

Nobody who lived through the '50s thought the '60s could've existed. So there's always hope.