“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.”

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.

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.

If it were possible to meet the Beloved while laughing and in a state of comfort, why should one suffer the anguish of separation?

Complete happiness lies in obedience to Allāh, and anguish is found in disobedience to Him and opposition against Him.

This world’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back.

I saw my parents as gods whose every wish must be obeyed or I would suffer the penalty of anguish and guilt.

The highest love. Highest power. I will let you in. Devour this anguish, I’m harboring, all to you, surrendering.

We are overcome by anguish at this illogical moment of humanity.

Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day; or the agonies which are have their origins in ecstasies which might have been.

Death is what men want when the anguish of living is more than they can bear.