Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.
It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.
Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.
There is, however, a change going on in the world. There's far more interest in drawing now than there has been in a long, long time. Schools are beginning to teach drawing again in a serious and meaningful way.
The art schools... you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it.
Of course, I did lots of what would be called graphic design now, what used to be called commercial art.
I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.
I think the leaders inevitably express the people they are leading.
I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.
I think if you touch ordinary people, they're simply ordinary people, the way they've always been. They work hard, they don't have really as much as they should.
I always felt that I had anxiety of survival in terms of livelihood even when I was making plenty of money.
I always felt I needed to teach to survive.
But I think doctors have always been either honest or dishonest.
