“What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.”

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.

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.