“The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.”

“The artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and he does it without destroying something else. ”

“Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us. ”

“My first thought, as a child, was that the artist brings something into the world that didn't exist before, and that he does it without destroying something else. A kind of refutation of the conservation of matter. That still seems to me its central magic, its core of joy.”

“…he is unlike the other customers. They sense it too, and look at him with hard eyes, eyes like little metal studs pinned into the white faces of young men [...] In the hush his entrance creates, the excessive courtesy the weary woman behind the counter shows him amplifies his strangeness. He orders coffee quietly and studies the rim of the cup to steady the sliding in his stomach. He had thought, he had read, that from shore to shore all America was the same. He wonders, Is it just these people I’m outside or is it all America?”

“What is this? He has a sensation of touching glass. He doesn't know if they are talking about nothing or making code for the deepest meanings.”

“Whatever men make," she says, "what they felt when they made it is there...Man is a means for turning things into spirit and turning spirit into things.”