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

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.

My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.

A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.

The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.

Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.

It’s a kind of madness in cosmopolitan cities now.

A lumberman will look at a forest and see so many board feet of lumber. I see a living city.

I’m from Samoan heritage, and with the rugby in our blood and everything,

In London, you’ll be walking around and, ‘Oh, there’s the ground.’ Every area of the city has a Premier League club. They all survive; they all exist with enough money, and that’s good.

In England, you have stadiums in the middle of the city.

Happiness is having a large, loving, caring, close-knit family in another city.

We grew up in the Rose Park section of Salt Lake City. It’s a good neighborhood but a tough one, on the poor side but proud.

I want to give that world to someone else. Most people in the city rush around so, they have no time to look at a flower. I want them to see it whether they want to or not.