Like most Americans of my age, I was very impressed by the dynamic capacities of the law, demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement and then Watergate, animated by Sam Ervin's mantra that no person is above the law.
Millions of Americans cannot tell you who lived at Mount Vernon or who wrote the Declaration of Independence - let alone the Emancipation Proclamation. But they know that to be 'a Benedict Arnold' is to be a traitor of the deepest dye - someone who c...
Americans are so direct. They'd ask me, 'What's your five-year plan? Do you have a five-year plan?' I don't know what I'm having for my tea tonight let alone a five-year plan.
I really love Robert Duvall, who I think is maybe the best American actor. I love Robert Duvall because the ability that he has to change and do the most amazing work.
We are taught to believe it's bad to be angry, or at least it's not good. That's not the case all throughout the world. People are more open and not embarrassed about it. For instance in Paris, people believe Americans have a really unhealthy relatio...
Prediction is structurally inseparable from the business of punditry: It creates the essential image of indefatigable authority that is punditry's very architecture; it flows from that calcified image, and it provides the substance for the story that...
Some prescient American collectors, including Vicki and Kent Logan and Mera and Donald Rubell, began collecting Chinese art before 2000 with a genuine passion, but as the auction prices exploded everyone was beating a path to the galleries and artist...
I don't want to collect Indian art, though pots and beadwork and blankets made by Indians remain the most beautiful art objects in the American West, in my opinion.
My initial plan was to spend a year in France, go to some kind of school and learn a bit of French. I went a year in an American college in the outskirts of Strasbourg, but got a glimpse of a real art school, L'Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, and enrolled...
Palin, Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others have made an art form of convincing far too many Americans to suspend their disbelief, and they have severely damaged the ability of our country to have serious discussions about serious challenges.
I'm very much involved in art. I started buying art a few years ago and really like the work of T.C. Cannon, who is a native American artist. Then I was introduced to Soviet-era Russian impressionism and started collecting that, especially Gely Korzh...
For an American, there's no automatic place where people love the art of poetry. There's not a social class that considers poetry its property the way in some countries there's a snob value to the art.
'Buncha Losers' comedy is one of those homegrown American art forms, up there with infomercials and Elvis-shaped soap carvings. No other civilization could have invented it. The French took a stab with Sartre's 'No Exit,' but then they had to ruin it...
New York is not the centre for American culture and art that it once was because of the forces of conservatism. Giuliani, capitalism - and then there was 9/11. I really believe that if I leave, it will suffer! Maybe that's why I love it here, because...
She listens to the delicate fluttering of sparrows' wings, tiny messengers. The sound reminds her of life - struggling, beating, rising, flying, and now dissolving into space.
Here at the edges, in the cracks and at the crossroads, stepping from shadow to shadow in the river of darkness that runs through the heart of Wink, he feels much more at home.
No one does. No one really knows how to be happy. You just get close, sometimes. That’s all I want – just to be close.
Because when you love something, you want to do it all the time, even if no one is paying you for it. At least that's how I felt about drawing.
Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.
What I say is, a town isn't a town without a bookstore. It may call itself a town, but unless it's got a bookstore it knows it's not fooling a soul.
Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.
