“If we are willing to act violently in pursuit of a peripheral interest, everyone can be certain that, when a vital interest is at stake, we will be still more violent.”

Women choose Alice [in Wonderland] because every woman sees herself as the only reasonable creature among crazy people who think they are disinherited monarchs

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser.

I think is the core of what it means to live a civilised life.

We call disasters unimaginable, but all we do is imagine such things. […]

Tomorrow may be a bit better than today; and, after all, you have to have a little faith in people-doesn’t diminish the glamour that clings to the man who turned the question over and look at it, elegantly, upside down.

You can’t have a decent food culture without a decent coffee culture: the two things grow up together.

Protein was the most valued ingredient 250 years ago: It was the rarest thing. Now the rarest thing we have is time: time to cook and time to eat.

There are two kinds of travelers. There is the kind who goes to see what there is to see, and the kind who has an image in his head and goes out to accomplish it.

You learn to sing with, not argue at, your possible readers.

I don’t think there’s any question journalists have become targets, but then I think that – that anyone who tries to practice liberty becomes a target of fanatics.

Music is a current of hard choices made to seem easy by the mind.

Leafing through Forbes or Fortune [magazine]s is like reading the operating manual of a strangely sanctimonious pirate ship

Lose your schematic conventions by finding some surprising symbol or shape in the welter of shades, and draw that.

If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

Would mistrust a poetry critic who couldn’t produce a rhyming couplet. Could one write about art without knowing how to draw?

Someone once said that the joy is not in writing but in having written. I can’t say I find that to be true, though I understand the sentiment.

It is, perhaps more than anything else, the arrest of time which has taken place in a completed work of art that gives certain plays their feeling of depth and significance.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.

The new kings of the world will live tranquilly for a long time, confining themselves to devouring each other and being parasites among each other on a cottage industry scale.

There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that is your own self. So you have to begin there, not outside, not on other people. That comes afterwards, when you have worked on your own corner.

You play a certain way for so long, and change is good. So I look forward to change, and I look forward to playing with the proper talent that we were able to put together.

Behold, directly overhead, a certain strange star was suddenly seen . . . Amazed, and as if astonished and stupified, I stood still

How I grew up, everybody was telling me, “You can’t do this, you can’t get tattoos, you’ve got to look a certain way.” Now, I’m like, “Why?”

My understanding of the creative process is simply that all cultures and all concerns meet at a certain point, the human point in which everything is related to one another. That has been my creative experience.