It is sobering to reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the struggle for independence.
Boy, there are days where I get up and say 'Where the hell did my talent go? Look at this crap that I'm producing here. This is terrible. Look, I wrote this yesterday. I hate this, I hate this.'
then Siddhartha began to understand that his son had not brought him happiness and peace, but suffering and worry. But he loved him, and he preferred the suffering and worries of love over happiness and joy without the boy.
If your doctor tells you you have a rare disease that he or she has never seen, if you've got an incurable cancer, boy, don't accept that. You know, go and get a second opinion.
I used to take five or six books away and bring five or six books back. Nobody gave me direction or advice and I read much in the way that a boy might watch television.
I'm dreaming of sleeping next to you and feeling like a lost little boy in a brand new town I'm counting my sheep and each one that passes is another dream to ashes And they all fall down. - Sleeping to Dream
I feel old and vulnerable. I now realise that I knew nothing and know nothing, but back when my career was beginning, I thought I was a man when, in fact, I was a dewy-eyed boy who'd not seen an avocado or eaten a tomato.
The Romans had been able to post their laws on boards in public places, confidant that enough literate people existed to read them; far into the Middle Ages, even kings remained illiterate.
If you care to define the South as a poor, rural region with lousy race relations, that South survives only in geographical shreds and patches and most Southerners don't live there any more.
But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making.
Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.
When I criticize Joseph Beuys or Francis Bacon, nobody calls those opinions anti-male. Putting female artists or their subject matter off-limits is itself sexist and limiting.
I know it's dangerous to take on bloggers. They can go after you every day, all day long, and anonymous people can chime in, too.
Although I adore the Italian High Renaissance, I'd rather look at Mannerism. The former is ordered, integrated, otherworldly, and grandiose; it leaves you feeling hungry for something flawed and of-the-flesh.
Galleries needn't be exactly like White Columns purely because times are bad again. But the idea of this special space could - should - help shape what comes next.
Lucian Freud's career affirms that the only thing an artist can do is remain true to whatever vision, (lack of) talent, or ideas that happened to pick them in order to be made known to the world.
Of all the biennials, triennials, quadrennials, internationals, and massive group shows, Documenta, established in 1955 and held once every five years in Kassel, Germany, is seen as the most serious. A statement show.
I would always hunch over, I was always taller than the boys. I had the extremely skinny legs... I would double up my socks, those ones from Footlocker, to make my legs look thicker.
Imagine writing a poem with a sweating, worried-looking boy handing you a different pencil at the end of every word. My golf, you may say, is no poem; nevertheless, I keep wanting it to be one.
But I couldn't draw as fast as she requested. Thus, I tried to create the worst abomination of a comic that I could, so as to make her not want comics anymore. That abomination, my friends, was Happy Noodle Boy.
My views on everything from welfare to a balanced budget to affirmative action can be traced to what Buddy and Helen Watts taught me as a young boy growing up poor but proud in Eufaula.
