Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

The poet is at the edge of our consciousness of the world, finding beyond the suspected nothingness which we imagine limits our perception another acre or so of being worth our venturing upon.

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

Imagination is like the drunk man who lost his watch and must get drunk again to find it.

We will always return to the private and inviolable act of reading as our culture's way of developing an individual.

I’ve carved the puppet, and I manipulate the strings, but while it’s on stage, the show belongs to the puppet.

In curved Einsteinian space we are at all times, technically, looking at the back of our own head.

A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.

I never intended to be a teacher. I just like going to school and learning things.

nothing now exists that is so valuable as whatever theoretically might replace it.

What I'm expecting is for you to behave like the gentleman I always thought you were.

For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

We never actively remember death, ' Odenigbo said. The reason we live as we do is because we do not remember that we will die. We will all die.

The beautiful thing about hip-hop is it's like an audio collage. You can take any form of music and do it in a hip-hop way and it'll be a hip-hop song. That's the only music you can do that with.

The cholerick man never wants woe.

The pleasure is in the path, the search for something good.

This whole thing called the internet and all this other kind of stuff is about to go crazy. It's all going to change. But, you know what's not going to change? The talented people.

Writing and directing your own film, for me, has been the best experience of my life.

If you come back from the dead, you don't have the same value system, I think.

All models are wrong; some models are useful.