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

The protein of our cultural imagination.

Most of the untranscribed and unpublished manuscripts in the book popped out of boxes at me when I wasn't looking for them; I picked them up out of the corner of my eye.

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

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."