“The function of the artist is to provide what life does not.”

“The function of the artist,' the Navajo answered, 'is to provide what life does not.”

“The purpose of art is to provide what life does not.”

“The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.”

“To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar.”

“Whatever goes wrong can be used to your advantage, providing it goes wrong enough.”

“If there’s a thing, a scene, maybe, an image that you want to see real bad, that you need to see but it doesn’t exist in the world around you, at least not in the form that you envision, then you create it so that you can look at it and have it around, or show it to other people who wouldn’t have imagined it because they perceive reality in a more narrow, predictable way. And that’s it. That’s all an artist does.”