In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.

Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that everybody's creative. They're not.

I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it.

Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist Church.

The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does.

I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

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

With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a professor.

Gossip is the currency of the discourse, so you should shut up about yourself. Never confess, never explain, never apologize, and never complain.

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

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.

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

I'm retiring because my time is up.

Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.

In images,... beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence.

My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that.