“All weddings are similar, but every marriage is different.”

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.

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.

Even though they are usually singing similiar messages that are in today’s music, it is good to be reminded that the message of Christ is just as much relevant today as it was then.

The attitude and reactions of artists toward their art children reveal an attitude similar to that which mothers in general possess toward their children. There is the same sensitivity to any criticism, the same possessive pride.

Innumerable suns exist; innumerable earths revolve around these suns in a manner similar to the way the seven planets revolve around our sun. Living beings inhabit these worlds.

What’s good about writing is that when you write novels or fiction, people can see that the problems in one region are similar to problems in another region.

The Pan-Africanism that envisaged the ideal of wholeness was gradually cut down to the size of a continent, then a nation, a region, an ethnos, a clan, and even a village in some instances But Pan-Africanism has not outlived its mission.

An act cannot be defined by the end sought by the actor, for an identical system of behaviour may be adjustable to too many different ends without altering its nature.

Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: it must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.

The biggest thing is just routine. I think that’s the biggest correlation between golfers and basketball players.