“A good-looking piece of scenery anywhere delights the eye and elevates the spirits. Some of us, crude creatures that we are, are merely excited; finer souls draw ethical and spiritual nutrients from the sight.”

a woman may be called a wife and mother for most of her life, while a man is called a husband and father only at his funeral.

Hospitality, or flinging wide the door to friends and wayfarers alike, was once important, back in a world without motels or safety nets, where a friend might find his castle burnt down or a wayfarer find bandits on his trail.

I was getting sick and tired of being lectured by dear friends with their little bottles of water and their regular visits to the gym. All of a sudden, we’ve got this voluntary prohibition that has to do with health and fitness. I’m not really in favor of health and fitness.

Perhaps it’s a good time to reconsider pleasure at its roots. Changing out of wet shoes and socks, for instance.

There is no ‘cat language.’ Painful as it is for us to admit, they don’t need one!

Sophistication called for a variety of talents and attitudes, but the minimum requirement was being in New York. Not all New Yorkers achieved it, but nobody elsewhere had a prayer.

Visiting is a pleasure; being visited is usually a mixed or ambivalent joy. … The visitor can always go home; the visitee is already home, trapped like a rat in a drainpipe.

Almost any dog thinks almost any human is the Great Spirit, the Primal Creator, and the Universal Force Behind the Sun and Tides. What human can resist?

I was so absolutely riveted, I felt I was looking into the eyes of the artist. Art just closed the gap of time and space. The 16th century became as real to me as the 20th. It was something magical.

We should open our eyes, see what’s in front of us, and act.

You should make photographs with your heart, mind, eye & soul.

Just a simple choice, right now, between fear and love. The eyes of fear want you to put bigger locks on your doors, buy guns, close yourself off. The eyes of love instead see all of us as one.

There in front of me was the Senator on the floor being held by the busboy.

When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw,

It dismantles and abolishes the horizon within which our knowing and choosing went on, and it sets up a new horizon within which the love of God transvalues our values and the eyes of that love transform our knowing.

I like acting because I get to find different parts of myself, or at least create different parts that don’t already exist, and see the world through someone else’s eyes.