“Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.”

For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal

All publicity works upon anxiety.

Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.

Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.

Hope is a contraband passed from hand to hand and story to story.

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

Buildings become furniture, courtyards become carpets and arrases, the streets are like galleries, the boulevards conservatories. It is a house, one or two centuries old, rich, bourgeois, distinguished. The only way of going out, or shutting the door behind you, is to leave the centre.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude.

His faith, perhaps, in some nice tenets might Be wrong; his life, I’m sure, was in the right.

A mighty pain to love it is, And ’tis a pain that pain to miss; But, of all pains, the greatest pain Is to love, but love in vain.

The search which takes place in my studio might best be described as a mining operation, a vertical dig in which a number of discoveries are apt to surface from a single shaft.

The world [is] now seeing might is right.

It didn’t mean forever but for right now I wanted Rush to be my first. He wouldn’t be my last. A stop I might never forget or get over. That was what scared me the most. Not being able to move on.

I might never breathe again once he walked away from me.

I was already headed for Hell, I might as well enjoy the ride.

Because to Americans, Chechnya might as well be a suburb of Narnia.