I've sort of escaped my background as people often do through art and culture.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s) I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art thinking that except for their tremendous gardens that the English are not primarily visual artists and are in nearly unsurpassable ways literary.

Works of art often last forever or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves especially gallery exhibitions are like flowers they bloom and then they die then exist only as memories or pressed in magazines and books.

Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity gizmos eating hanging out things that make noise - all are now the norm often edging out much else.

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

The sadness of the incomplete the sadness that is often Life but should never be Art.

Fame is the echo of actions resounding them to the world save that the echo repeats only the last art but fame relates all and often more than all.

Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women's magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day.

Art is only a means to life to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way something which is overlooked not only by the public but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

You must not fight too often with one enemy or you will teach him all your art of war.

Even in literature and art no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will nine times out of ten become original without ever having noticed it.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

I'm often called an old-fashioned modernist. But the modernists had the absurd idea that architecture could heal the world. That's impossible. And today nobody expects architects to have these grand visions any more.