“Wherever people feel safe – they will be indifferent.”

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

To paraphrase several sages: Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers.

The truth is balance. However the opposite of truth, which is unbalance, may not be a lie.

Mallarme said that everything in the world exists in order to end in a book. Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Today everything exists to end in a photograph.

Instead of just recording reality, photographs have become the norm for the way things appear to us, thereby changing the very idea of reality and of realism.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Kindness, kindness, kindness. I want to make a New Year’s prayer, not a resolution. I’m praying for courage.

If tragedy is an experience of hyperinvolvement, comedy is an experience of underinvolvement, of detachment.

Do stuff. be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

My professional life has nothing to do with my personal life and vice versa.

Dinosaurs did not walk with humans. The evolutionary record says different. They gambled.

Successful people don’t have any fewer problems than unsuccessful people; they just have a different mindset in dealing with them.

Certainly I accept my role and responsibility as a public figure and a lot of it you take the good with the bad, dealing with different adversities in life, you just try to do the best you can do.

It is dangerous and unbelievably fast and entirely different from the kind of track I am used to racing on.

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

It’s sad to be constantly judged for every move you make after your first success. If you wear your hair differently, you have changed.

If my parents had discouraged me, I would have turned out very differently. They raised me in an open-minded, liberal environment.