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.

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

We want to create a sort of linguistic Lourdes, where evil and misfortune are dispelled by a dip in the waters of euphemism.

A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.

[It] was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.

[The prisons are] the monuments of Australia-the Paestums [of] an extraordinary time-an effort to exile en masse a whole class.

A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.

Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.

Woven through these galleries are some of the most deliriously awful canvases of the 19th century high-finance porn of the ripest sort.