"There is a great deal of busywork..." - Quote by John Updike

“The educational aspect of art shows has become overbearing: some of exhibits can leave you bleary from trying to read the walls. Presumably a piece of art is timeless and it can say something to us. You are taking away the right of art to talk for itself.”

“The muttered hint, "Remember, you have a stroke here," freezes my joints like a blast from Siberia.”

“Americans have been conditioned to respect newness, whatever it costs them.”

“No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”

“The frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter.”

“If it were a rainy day, a drunken vigil, a fit of the spleen, a course of physic, sleepy Sunday, an ill run at dice, a long tailor's bill, a beggar's purse, a factious head, a hot sun, costive diet, want of books, and a just contempt for learning - but for these. . .the number of authors and of writing would dwindle away to a degree most woeful to behold.”

“Life itself is ... a sleep within a sleep.”

“She comprehended the perversity of life, that in the struggle lies the joy.”

“When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of the tide and resist in terror its ebb. We are afraid it will never return. We insist on permanency, on duration, on continuity; when the only continuity possible, in life as in love, is in growth, in fluidity - in freedom”