"Those who understand the complexities of human nature know that joy and pain, ugliness and beauty, love and hate, mercy and cruelty and other conflicting emotions often blend and cannot be separated from each other. Thus I am able not only to make people turn away from the Creator, but to damage their own bodies, all in the name of some imaginary cause."

—Satan from IB Singer's The Destruction of Kreshev

"Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusuable."

—Paul Valery

"Photography is an art if the photographer loves it enough, and if the juror who selects the show responds."

—Fairfield Porter, "Art in its Own Terms"

There is no health; physicians say that we
at best enjoy but a neutrality.
And can there be worse sickness than to know
That we are never born well, nor can be so?
We are born ruinous...

—John Donne, "An Anatomy of the World"

"...the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach the method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects—Basic Basque and so forth—spoken only by certain elaborate machines."

"His life was a constant war with insensate objects that fell apart, or attacked him, or refused to function, or viciously got themselves lost as soon as they entered the sphere of his existence."

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

"The fact is a wire through which one sends a current."

—Saul Bellow

"The necessary premise is that a man is somehow more than the his 'characteristics,' all the emotions, strivings, tastes and constructions it pleases to call 'My Life.' We have ground to hope that a Life is something more than a such a cloud of particles, mere facticity. Go through what is comprehensible and you conclude that only the incomprehensible gives any light."

—Saul Bellow, Herzog

"Good taste is not essential, and it is often a brake on energy."

-Fairfield Porter, Art in its Own Terms

"A magnificent temple is a laudable monument of national taste and religion, and the enthusiast who entered the dome of St. Sophia, might be tempted to suppose that it was the residence, or even the workmanship of the Deity. Yet how dull is the artifice, how insignificant is the labour, if it be compared with the formation of the vilest insect that crawls upon the surface of the temple!"

-Sir Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall

"Every law, either human or divine, was trampled under foot, and as long as the party was succesful, its deluded followers appeared careless of private distress or public calamity."

-Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

On art scholarship and movements: 

"It is the economic pressure on scholarship exerted by the universities that lead to the naming of movements in the arts, and once a movement is named, it is justified by words, and the literature around it gives it critical validity."

On the sculpture of Giacometti: 

"The roughness of the modeling can be thought of as the beating anything takes in an assertion of its existence against the vastness of the universe. It is its dignity, its payment for existence against the weight of indifferent adversity. The complications of the surface are, as it were, the scars of battles of limited assertion."

-Fairfield Porter, Art in its Own Terms

Joseph Epstein on the hook shot:

“I shall never forget the afternoon, sometime along about my thirteenth year, when, shooting baskets alone, I came upon the technique for shooting the hook. Although today it has nowhere near the consequence of the jump shot—an innovation that has been to basketball what the jet has been to air travel—the hook is still the single most beautiful shot in the game. The rhythm and grace of it, the sway of the body off the pivot, the release of the ball behind the head and off the fingertips, the touch and instinct involved in its execution, make the hook an altogether balletic thing, and to achieve it is to feel one of the most delectable sensations in sports. That afternoon, on a deserted side street, shooting on a rickety wooden backboard and a black rim without a net, I felt it and grew nearly drunk on the feeling. Rain came down, dirt washed in the gutters, flecks of it spattering my clothes and arms and face, but, soaked and cold though I was, I do not think I would have left that basket on that afternoon for anything. I threw up hook after hook, from every angle, from farther and farther out, off the board, without the board, and hook after hook went in. Only pitch darkness drove me home.”

-JE, Masters of the Game