“And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been.”

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

A person isn’t who they are during the last conversation you had with them – they’re who they’ve been throughout your whole relationship.

It is a tremendous act of violence to begin anything.

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.

Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.

There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.

The ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

All the soarings of my mind begin in my blood.

More belongs to marriage than four legs in a bed.

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.

I hold this to be the highest task for a bond between two people: that each protects the solitude of the other.

All emotions are pure which gather you and lift you up; that emotion is impure which seizes only one side of your being and so distorts you.

Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

I’ve been in some beautiful places, but the prettiest sight is flying back to New Orleans. Being able to look down and say, ‘I know where I am now.’

When I make a photograph I want it to be an altogether new object, complete and self-contained, whose basic condition is order (unlike the world of events and actions whose permanent condition is change and disorder).

With a popular show, you know that there’s expectations there, so that’s a little nerve-wracking when you’re new and you’re just trying to find your legs on something, but it’s exciting, too, because that’s what we work so hard for.

Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area, and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.

When the image is new, the world is new.

Death’s an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew.

There is always something new out of Africa.