"I hold that the perfection of form and beauty is contained in the sum of all men."

"Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence."

"What beauty is, I know not, though it adheres to many things."

"No single man can be taken as a model for a perfect figure, for no man lives on earth who is endowed with the whole of beauty."

"Barack Obama's life was so much simpler in 2009. Back then, he had refined the cold act of blaming others for the bad economy into an art form. Deficits? Blame Bush's tax cuts. Spending? Blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No business investment? Blame Wall Street."

"I think there was a revolution in poetry, associated chiefly with Eliot and Pound but maybe it is of the nature of revolutions or of the nature of history that their innovations should later come to look trivial or indistinguishable from technical tricks."

"The poet exposes himself to the risk. All that has been said about poetry, all that he has learned about poetry, is only a partial assurance."

"Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art."