“Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.”

The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.

My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.

A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.

The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.

Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

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.

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.

The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.

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.

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

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.

I never rush myself. See, they can’t start the game without me.

I think my view is that whenever you project into the future you’re never likely to be accurate in the details, or the paraphernalia and style. It’s in the spirit of it.

I’ve never met a girl who could stop me looking at all the others. If I did, I’d marry her.

Eddie Cochran – I never got to see him live, but he could play. Him and Buddy Holly, they were the best guitarists. They could get a good raunchy beat going.

Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.

I never trashed a hotel room or did drugs.

Noble ideas, great sentiments have always existed and have always been transmitted, but wars have never ceased.

I can never be anonymous – especially when I walk round looking like this; especially when I take so much trouble not to be anonymous, right?