“For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.”

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)

This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.

At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.

It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.

The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.

The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

Oh, why must a man like that be made unhappy when there are lots of girls about who would worship the very ground he trod on?

You see a lot of smart guys with dumb women, but you hardly ever see a smart woman with a dumb guy.

I don’t watch a lot of other basketball away from the gym. But I do look at LeBron’s box score. I want to see how many points, rebounds and assists he had, and how he shot from the field.

This summer is going to be a different summer for a lot of people. Everyone is going to take care of their own business and everyone is going to do what’s best for them, including me.

Stay out of the gentlemen’s clubs. Get a lot of rest. Just have fun and relax and stay focused.

There’s a lot of insincerity about the actions of our legislators; they create distractions – like this anti-gay law you alluded to – and try to mobilise, to exacerbate people’s emotions. Until the legislators started making laws, people minded, generally, their own business.

It’s been a journey, the NBA. It’s taken me a lot farther than I ever expected.

Yeah, I play a lot of point guard. LeBron plays a lot of point guard. A lot of people are thinking too much on positions.