"Enforced solitude, as in solitary confinement, is a terrible and disorienting punishment, but freely chosen solitude is an immense blessing. To be out of the rattle and clang of quotidian life, to be away from the garbage of other people's amusements and the overflow of their unwanted subjectivities, is the essential escape. Solitude is, beyond question, one of the worlds great gifts and an indispensable aid to creativity, no matter what level that creation may be hatched at."

“Our culture puts enormous emphasis on "socialization", on the supposedly supreme virtues of establishing close relations with others.”

“Some new works of art have values of some kind or another. Others, the majority, have little or none. But newness as such, in art, is never a value.”

“The sense of not having the whole story that comes from living close up to traumatic events.”

“Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton give us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.”

“We all come into the world with baggage which, in the end, we have no hope of reclaiming, The main item in mine was my father.”

“It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.”