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.

My dad was this sort of avant-garde guy who did all kinds of weird things. He was a true original and anybody who met him never forgot him.

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.

It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero Andy Warhol who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.