“What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.”

“Whatever art offered the men and women of previous eras, what it offers our own, it seems to me, is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. The town I grew up in had many vacant lots; when I go back now, the vacant lots are gone. They were a luxury, just as tigers and rhinoceri, in the crowded world that is making, are luxuries. Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”

“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.”

“Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.”

“We are each of us like our little blue planet, hung in black space, upheld by nothing but our mutual reassurances, our loving lies.”

“Looking foolish does the spirit good. The need not to look foolish is one of youth's many burdens; as we get older we are exempted from more and more.”

“Museums and bookstores should feel, I think, like vacant lots - places where the demands on us are our own demands, where the spirit can find exercise in unsupervised play.”