“Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.”

The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.

Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.

The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.

Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

The zoo cannot but disappoint.

It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

To be naked is to be oneself.

The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.

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

A writers job is to destroy and then to build the thing back up again by a chosen means.

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

Well, you know, in the fundamentalist milieu of the Afrikaners, there was a sense that they were a chosen people, that they were bringing civilization to the blacks.

But it may be that the way of life that he has chosen for himself and the peculiar strength and sweetness of his character may have an ever-growing influence over his fellow men so that, long after his death perhaps, it may be realized that there lived in this age a very remarkable creature.

If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.

The NBA’s chosen ones think I’m setting a bad example? I think they need to look around and stop taking themselves so seriously.

War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.

For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.