“Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.”

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.

Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.

Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.

Today the discredit of words is very great.

I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

Writers who have neither product utopian trash.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.

A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.

Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.

The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.

In sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

If someone tried to deprive you of your rights, you’ve got to resist it. You’ve got to resent it. You’ve got to fight against it.

After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.

But such a tiny and trivial thing as an umbrella can deprive you of the sight of such a stupendous fact as the sun.

I definitely gravitate towards things like vegetables, chicken, brown rice, but I don’t deprive myself of anything. If I want a Sprinkles cupcake, I’m having a Sprinkles cupcake. But I’m not going to have one every day… you just have to have a sensible outlook on all of it.

Adversity deprives us of our judgment.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

Without you I am like a plant deprived of sunshine wishing it could grow.