The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.

It is conventional to call 'monster' any blending of dissonant elements. I call 'monster' every original inexhaustible beauty.

I am an unconventional beauty. I grew up in a high school where if you didn't have a nose job and money and if you weren't thin you weren't cool popular beautiful. I was always told that I wasn't pretty enough to be on television.

I think one of the things that language poets are very involved with is getting away from conventional ideas of beauty because those ideas contain a certain attitude toward women certain attitudes toward sex certain attitudes toward race etc.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment neither of them all that conventional but I'm not ready to choose between them yet let alone settle down to the process of writing.

Who knows what true loneliness is - not the conventional word but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion.