"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."
"The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders."
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Source: Robert Hunter, David G. Dodd (2005). “The Complete Annotated Grateful Dead Lyrics: The Collected Lyrics of Robert Hunter and John Barlow, Lyrics to All Original Songs, with Selected Traditional and Cover Songs”, p.127, Simon and Schuster
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More quotes by Robert Hughes
"Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel."
"A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop."
"Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent."
"The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world."
"The greater the artist, the greater the doubt."