“The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.”

I tried to oppose the academic to the marketplace.

The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea… The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

I want to emphasize the idea of black as intellectuality and conventionality.

My painting represents the victory of the forces of darkness and peace over the powers of light and evil.

As an artist I would like to eliminate the symbolic pretty much, for black is interesting not as a color but as a non-color and as the absence of color.

As for a picture, if it isn’t worth a thousand words, the hell with it.

So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.

The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.

Only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea. A good artist does not need anything.

Art is not the spiritual side of business.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Painting cannot be the only activity of a mature artist.

Art is art. Everything else is everything else.

We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t.

The artist should once and forever emancipate himself from the bondage of appearance.

An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.

Success happened little by little for me. I tasted the flavor of fame in small doses: I started at 10 years old when I won a music contest; I was performing at birthday parties, company meetings.

Perhaps one cannot, what is more one must not, understand what happened, because to understand [the Holocaust] is almost to justify.

I don’t care too much what happened in the past.

You say, “Something important really happened here. I really had hold of something I was visited by the muse.” And that’s enough to make you continue the months and years to finish the whole book.

In this ordinary life without Ren, I think my life with him was like a dream. Especially on a snowy night like this. On a night as cold as this. Someone keep this guy warm for me, please.

Many things happened in my life, and I thought that they changed me. But in the end, nothing has changed since I was seventeen.

I think within a year or so, perhaps, if 9/11 had not happened, in Afghanistan would have been a very broad-based general uprising against the Taliban.

The Internet is the best thing that ever happened to China. It turns us into individuals and also enables us to share our perceptions and feelings. It creates a culture of individualism and exchange even though the real society doesn’t promote it.