“Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.”

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.

Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.

A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory.

This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

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.

Even if a relationship doesn’t work out, you can always take something positive from something negative. You never know what’s around the corner.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.

It is my dying wish to travel around the world; to feel this hurt in a slightly different way!

There is entirely too much charm around, and something must be done to stop it.

Be around people that make your problems seem smaller and the possibility of life much bigger.

If you keep quiet and claim that your silence speaks, you’re silently part of the cruelty that goes around you. Thus make your voice sing.

Sometimes the words just fall out of me when I’m around you. So there’s no need to say I’m talented, I’m just lucky to have you as my muse.

Here lies one who knew how to get around him, men who were cleverer than himself