"He loathed gentility and social convention. To him they smacked of fakery, like the various artistic symbolisms, Surrealism among them, that modern painting had contrived. The real world, stripped bare, already presented unfathomable strangeness and fascination. An artistic life should exhaust itself trying to unpack it."

Michael Kimmelman about Lucian Freud

"Outside it is day. You have entered, and your eyes are blinded with so much darkness. It penetrates deeply into the pupils of your eyes and hurts. You close your eyes for a moment, until they have adjusted themselves. Both are within you, the darkness and the brightness, they are yours in the depths of you retina, and you can draw them from the same well; which it will be depends on whether you stand in the light or in darkness."

from The Death of the Adversary by Hans Keilson

"The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heavens sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God."

from Moby Dick by Herman Melville

"... in America, where a national bent for proprietary branding can confuse a signature look with quality."

Peter Schjeldahl in a review of Blinky Palermo

"If you listen first, and write later, then whatever you write will have had time to filter through your brain, and you'll be in what you say. This is what makes you exist. If you are only a reflector of information, are you really there?"

Jaron Lanier