The promise of eternal life makes people forsake the life they're given.
The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.
In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.
A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.
Vice incapacitates a man from all public duty; it withers the powers of his under- standing, and makes his mind paralytic.
How the hell do I know why there were Nazis? I don't know how the can-opener works.
There was a fairly big difference between Detroit and Beverly Hills. I remember this. Detroit actually was a prosperous bustling city when we moved here in 1941. But the first day in Detroit, you always wore a shirt and a tie to school. And I wore a shirt and a tie to Beverly Hills High School, and a girl came up to me and said, "Where are you from?" And I said, "Detroit. " And she said, "And you won't be wearing a tie tomorrow, will you?" And I said, "You're absolutely correct. " So that was my first adjustment to a slightly more casual environment.
There is a kind of dictatorship that can come about through a creeping paralysis of thought, readiness to accept paternalistic measures by government, and along with those measures comes a surrender of our own responsibilities and therefore a surrender of our own thought over our own lives and our own right to exercise the vote. The free system gives the right to every citizen to do something for himself. Because he has the right, the opportunity is always there.