“If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.”

To live and die amongst foreigners may seem less absurd than to live persecuted or tortured by one’s fellow countrymen….

The existence of pleasure is the first mystery. The existence of pain has prompted far more philosophical speculation.

Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal

It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.

What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.

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

The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

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

Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature

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.

There’s an element of that that’s either God-given, a talent that you’re not necessarily responsible for.

Fourteen years have given me a lot and I can’t thank God and the industry enough.

So we can feel grateful for what we have been given. Sadness soon disappears and, in return, we get inspired to bless others.

New York has given me a lot, but I still don’t consider it home.

You have to work with what you are given, even in Shakespeare. we have our form and it is important that we free ourselves through it.

The legs that I have made are far more perfect than the ones nature would have given me – my mother’s side of the family have awful legs.

The best advice anybody could have given me was to keep getting up over and over again.

To see things as you see them or to see things differently—until you have given the whole world its freedom—you’ll never have your freedom.