The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.

The experimental poetry thing is not my thing. It's a programme of the avant-garde: basically a refusal of the kind of poetry I write.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.

I think, on the rap side of life, I've always been inspired by and respected Missy Elliott for a long time. She's funny and created an image for herself that was non-sexualized but was really interesting and really cool and really kind of avant-garde in a lot of ways.

I watched a lot of avant-garde films, like Maya Deren's work, and I love film's technical ability to do things that are impossible in real life. It's related to the way collage allows you to manipulate reality and the hierarchies that are inherent in our awful but amazing world.

The avant-garde spirit is not just a youthful sentiment - I live my life by it.

Je crois que nous avons toujours besoin d'une p?riode de vide avant de pouvoir changer, un peu comme la nature a des cycles et qu'il faut passer par un temps d'hiver et d'immobilit? pour que la vie revienne au printemps suivant.

Admirer quelqu'un, s'inspirer de son parcours, c'est avant tout grandir et devenir soi.

The truth is, everyone likes to look down on someone. If your favorites are all avant-garde writers who throw in Sanskrit and German, you can look down on everyone. If your favorites are all Oprah Book Club books, you can at least look down on mystery readers. Mystery readers have sci-fi readers. Sci-fi can look down on fantasy. And yes, fantasy readers have their own snobbishness. I'll bet this, though: in a hundred years, people will be writing a lot more dissertations on Harry Potter than on John Updike. Look, Charles Dickens wrote popular fiction. Shakespeare wrote popular fiction-until he wrote his sonnets, desperate to show the literati of his day that he was real artist. Edgar Allan Poe tied himself in knots because no one realized he was a genius. The core of the problem is how we want to define "literature". The Latin root simply means "letters". Those letters are either delivered-they connect with an audience-or they don't. For some, that audience is a few thousand college professors and some critics. For others, its twenty million women desperate for romance in their lives. Those connections happen because the books successfully communicate something real about the human experience. Sure, there are trashy books that do really well, but that's because there are trashy facets of humanity. What people value in their books-and thus what they count as literature-really tells you more about them than it does about the book.

In numele si sub teroarea ei (plictiselii, n.m.) parasesc oamenii caminul si moartea agreabila legata de el si se avanta in lume, spre a muri undeva fara acoperis si fara lacrimi; adolescentii se gandesc la sinucideri in zile infinite de primavara, iar servitoarele fara amanti se lamenteaza duminicile, de parca inima lor e un cimitir in care mortii nu pot dormi.

Il y a les sachants et les savants: c'est la m?moire qui fait les uns, c'est la philosophie qui fait les autres. La philosophie ne s'apprend pas; la philosophie est la r?union des sciences acquises au g?nie qui les applique.

L'?tude du beau est un duel o? l'artiste crie de frayeur avant d'?tre vaincu.

Avant-garde music is sort of research music. You're glad someone's done it but you don't necessarily want to listen to it.

I like fantasy. I like horror science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies.

I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener I'm convinced of the opposite.

The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.