I'm retiring because my time is up.

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

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

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

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

Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

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.

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

The biggest battle in life is with yourself

Much later in life, though, Gracie made a major contribution to the opera world. She stayed out of it.

a personality devoted uniquely to its own development absorbs other lives.

[Yoga] never calms me. Ever. But it certainly helps me prevent something.

They first condemn that first advised the ill.

I would surrender my being to see you whole once more.

There's a dark underside to philanthropy. People who give a bunch of money are deferred to, even when they are wrong. The emperor cannot be shown to have no clothes.

Live the questions now.

Learn something today in order to make tomorrow a better today.

The quality of our questions determine the quality of our lives.