“Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.”

As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.

What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.

Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity.

Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.

For the Cro-Magnons, space is a metaphysical arena of continually intermittent appearances and disappearances.

Paintings record what the painter remembers. Because each one of us forgets different things, a photo more than a painting may change its meaning according to who is looking at it.

For the artist, drawing is discovery. And that is not just a slick phrase; it is quite literally true.

When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.

Every authentic poem contributes to the labor of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart…

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].

The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.

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.

Grace is an energy; not a mere sentiment; not a mere thought of the Almighty; not even a word of the Almighty.

The whole thing about acting, the draw for me, is the opportunity to do things you don’t get to do in real life.

One of the symptoms of a declining social order is that its members have to give most of their time to politics, rather than to the real tasks of economic production, in an attempt to patch up the cracks already appearing from the ‘inner contradictions’ of such a system.

The real reason we haven’t had peace is because of a persistent refusal of the Palestinians to recognize a Jewish state in any border.

I got a little tattoo on my face, I’ll never be able to work another real job so I consider that to be kinda forcing myself to stick to music.

God is utterly simple; for every composite being necessarily has a cause of its own composition, and so, since God is the first principle of all things, there can be no real composition whatever in God.

Some people are still unaware that reality contains unparalleled beauties. The fantastic and unexpected, the ever-changing and renewing is nowhere so exemplified as in real life itself.

I think all actors are on the constant search for a real challenge just to keep things interesting.