Human society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap. The realm of literature is the realm of these accidental manners and humours--a spacious realm; and the true literary artist concerns himself mainly with them.
I have a feeling a lot of artists' work got lost [because of AIDS]. Howard was fortunate because his family and friends supported him, but a chilling thing I remember was these guys at St. Vincent's [Hospital] who would call out for someone to listen to them, just for a moment. They were dying alone. Who knows what happened to their work? It's been a process to follow the thread to find out everything Howard did. It's getting over that shock.
If you see something is going wrong within politics and the world today, then some Hip Hop artist is gonna come along and get straight with it. If they think that there's a lot of racism going on then there's another Hip Hop artist who's gonna come out and speak their mind.
Some artists leave remarkable things which, a 100 years later, don't work at all. I have left my mark; my work is hung in museums, but maybe one day the Tate Gallery or the other museums will banish me to the cellar... you never know.
In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective.
Archimedes was my ideal. I admired the works of artists, but to my mind, they were only shadows and semblances. The inventor, I thought, gives to the world creations which are palpable, which live and work.
The past is of no importance. The present is of no importance. It is with the future that we have to deal. For the past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are.