"Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence— the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life."

“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.”