Loss Within Loss: Trying to Find Words for Things Unspeakable, a chapter within a book about losing artists to AIDS, 2001

The conjuring of truth that transcends specifics is, of course, one of the factors that defines art. If the truth being revealed is basically biographic, the task is great: the artist needs to make metaphor out of personal detail, to allow generalizations to emerge from particulars. The more idiosyncratic the specifics, the harder this is.