“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 essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.

All creation is in the art of seeing.

Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.

You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.

It helps that, if I don’t want to play, I don’t really have to! I’m not the best drummer in the world, but it’s something I love and enjoy, and that sounds like a good trade.

Good books put a finger on emotions that are deeply our own – but that we could never have described on our own.

I’ve always known that if I recorded an album, it would come out, and people would enjoy it!

I’ve always enjoyed animation and voiceover work. That’s something that I’ve been proactive about.

I enjoy all kinds of music. But it is kind of strange when I do parodies, instead of setting up drums and guitar amps.

I like, for instance, ‘Serpico.’ I enjoyed playing Serpico because Frank Serpico was there. He existed. He was a real life person and I could – I could embody him. I could, you know.

If there are dominant teams, people enjoy discussing whether that’s good or bad for the game.

I don’t think any decent human being enjoys recruiting.