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- Beauty has to happen first, then you can begin to look for it.
- Beauty comes before perception, perception comes before reflection.
- How do you formulate a metaphysical question unless you understand metaphysical answers?
- When I don’t know how to begin, I read Shakespeare. When I don’t know how to end, I read Shakespeare. When I’m in the middle, I read Shakespeare.
- Should we seek reality or flee from it? A question that touches on both ethics and aesthetics at once.
- I have no idea of who I am. Is there a core me? This is not a metaphysical question — it is a metaphysical anxiety.
- There is something hidden. Poetry buries it further down, philosophy digs it up.
- Writers write for themselves, not for social good. Artists are selfish. Which is why we need them.
- I am happiest when I’m directing a play, next happiest when I’m writing one, third happiest when I’m reading Shakespeare to learn how to write one.
- Whenever scientists get around to inventing immortality, they will have finally invented the last layer of hell.
- It’s easy to mistype mortality and end up with morality. I find that interesting.
- Modernity means that quantity has replaced quality.
- To give up — to surrender — your attention to another person is to love them. (So what happens when we surrender our attention to technology?)
- It is impossible to imagine this generation of tech millionaires becoming patrons of the arts — it’s comical.
- The only thing we really have to learn, properly, is tragedy. Schools should teach tragedy instead of science.
