Conservatism cherishes tradition; innovation fetishizes novelty. They tug in different directions, the one toward the past, the other toward the future.

Throughout the nineteen-seventies and eighties, especially during periods of recession, employees were moved from offices to cubicles.

Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow. If the present differed from the past, it was usually worse: supernatural theories of history tend to involve decline, a fall from grace, the loss of God's favor, corruption.

History's written from what can be found; what isn't saved is lost, sunken and rotted, eaten by earth.

I almost moved into a place over a funeral parlor. My father said, 'That's just too macabre,' but I thought I'd be embracing my mortality. I told him it would keep me grounded - like when people get skull tattoos.

That the God-man died for his people, and that His death is their life, is an idea which was in some degree foreshadowed by the older mystical sacrifices.

The work of the artist is to express what is repressed or even to speak the unspoken grief of society.

I checked myself out in that funeral parlour scene. I saw myself laughing, because there was a shot of Ed and I together and Mary was right in back of us. My head turned from the camera and I saw myself laughing, because Mary was absolutely brilliant in that thing.