“Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.”

Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].

The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.

What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.

Propaganda requires a permanent network of communication so that it can systematically stifle reflection with emotive or utopian slogans. Its pace is usually fast.

Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It’s the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

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

It’s going to take a shoehorn to prise these two teams apart

Was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.

That which once united man Now drives him apart.

You always know when you’re going to arrive. If you go by car, you don’t. Apart from anything else, I prefer cycling. It puts you in a good mood, I find.

When life falls apart always remember that this too will pass. Life will have its unexpected turns.

It’s not easy in this phosphorescent gloom telling waking dreams apart anyhow.

Earlier, I used to charge territories instead of my fees as an actor, but I realised it was better to keep the two apart.