Core Quote by John Ashbery

“Long since, the standard way of understanding surface has been as an abstract and undifferentiated plane that functions above all to veil or delimit…

— Sylvia Lavin

I don't mind hidden depths but I insist that there be a surface.

— James Nicoll

I will say without reservations that from my point of view there can be no abstractions. Any shape or area that has not the…

— Mark Rothko

The texture of experience is prior to everything else.

— Willem de Kooning

Where there was nature and earth, life and water, I saw a desert landscape that was unending, resembling some sort of crater, so devoid…

— Bret Easton Ellis

The stripping away of illusion and the struggle to find personal reality can be likened to the peeling of an apple. As one peels…

— Meredith L. Young-Sowers

I thought I had reached a point in life where everything would be smooth. But it is not. It just gets more jagged and…

— Sylvester Stallone

But a few choosing to venture deeper into the painful corridors of their affliction, found after a while that they could now grind and…

— Thomas Pynchon

Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any…

— Jeremy Bentham

It is only after you have come to know the surface of things ... that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But…

— Italo Calvino

I kept waiting for him to lay bare something more than this pointed unobjectionableness, but all that rose to the surface was more surface

— Philip Roth

You can't be deep without a surface

— Jonathan Lethem