Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.

- Peter Schjeldahl

Beauty is not a concept. It is the animal joy of the mind.

- Peter Schjeldahl

Matisse can make you hate your life for its comparatively insipid joys.

- Peter Schjeldahl

A lot of education is like teaching marching; I try to make it more like dancing.

- Peter Schjeldahl

I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed.

- Peter Schjeldahl

Why do you need street smarts? Shrewdness? Toughness? It's to protect something soft that is going to be in danger if it's exposed at the wrong time …

- Peter Schjeldahl

My problem with political art is not that it's bad art necessarily, but that it is terrible politics.

- Peter Schjeldahl

The artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing an…

- Peter Schjeldahl

The problem of making artists talk about their work is that when they're making their work the left-brain is shut off. So if you talk to an artist ab…

- Peter Schjeldahl