Quote

I also had a tremendous passion for art and read a lot.

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history.

I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.

At Cornell University, my professor of European literature, Vladimir Nabokov, changed the way I read and the way I write. Words could paint pictures, I learned from him. Choosing the right word, and the right word order, he illustrated, could make an enormous difference in conveying an image or an idea.

I've admired Lawrence master from his choreographer days. I love how he experiments and makes it work. I like his attention to detail and the intrigue in his movies.

There were some extremely good teachers there that were great artists really in their own right. It was actually very hard to concentrate on getting down to going any work being an art student especially when it's a flighty thing at best.

I was a student at Harvard, and that's where I learned about so-called avant-garde music. Jackson Pollock, abstract expressionism and painting were well known at this time.

There is incredible power in the arts to inspire and influence.

I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art.

We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.