“What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.”

Every city has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this, hasn’t changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.

Whenever he looked he saw the labour of existence; and this labour, recognised as such, was what constituted reality for him. (On Vincent Van Gogh)

This was once achieved by extensive deprivation. Today in the developed countries it is being achieved by imposing a false standard of what is and what is not desirable.

At times failure is very necessary for the artist. It reminds him that failure is not the ultimate disaster. And this reminder liberates him from the mean fussing of perfectionism.

It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.

The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous.

The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.

The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

There is great wisdom in this… but I would add that opinions differ significantly from arse-holes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined.

It is not within the province of the state to make significant decisions concerning the custody of children merely because it could make a ‘better’ decision.

Elegance is no longer significant; clothes have to be fun.

You know, I’m a physician. I like to diagnose things. And, you know, I’ve diagnosed some pretty, pretty significant issues that I think a lot of people resonate with.

And it was about then, about that time, that I began to find life unsatisfactory as an explanation of itself and was forced to adopt the method of the artist of not explaining but putting the blocks together in some other way that seems more significant to him. Which is a rather fancy way of saying I started writing.

But when you are significant is when you help other people be successful. That lasts many a lifetime.

Rational discussion is useful only when there is a significant base of shared assumptions.

The polls show that concern over inequality among the general public rose pretty sharply after the Occupy movement started, very probably as a consequence. And there are other policy issues that came to the fore, which are significant.