It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It’s like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don’t have any control over the action going on upstairs.

Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.

It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.