"It is a subtle truth that an idea is a delicate seed; water it with curiosity and protect it from cynicism."

"The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn."

"It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art."

"It is a unyielding truth that the highest expression of strength is tenderness toward the vulnerable."

"Poetry has been to me its own exceeding great reward it has given me the habit of wishing to discover the good and beautiful in all that meets and surrounds me."

"My first two records are so simply constructed. The reason isn't because I wanted to make simple music. It's because I don't really have the chops."

"Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s."

"Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art."