If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.
Fear and euphoria are dominant forces, and fear is many multiples the size of euphoria. Bubbles go up very slowly as euphoria builds. Then fear hits, and it comes down very sharply. When I started to look at that, I was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.
In Bach there is still too much crude Christianity, crude Germanism, crude scholasticism; he stands on the threshold of European (modern) music, but he looks back from there to the Middle Ages.
I'm at the point in my life where I don't want to work as hard. Actually, I've had to take a good hard look at workaholism and it's effect on one's mental health.
I started making photographs as if I were a child myself. This got me to look at things more closely, more slowly, and from vantage points I hadn't considered before.
You know, you look at the chaos in the conservative camp right now, it's only too tempting to blame it all on pot. But in fact, the Reagan revolution owes a lot to Reefer. For one thing, it's made the symptoms of senility socially acceptable.