“We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”

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.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.

Have you ever noticed that there are people who do things which are most indelicate, and yet at the same time – beautiful?

Any writer of any worth at all hopes to play only a pocket-torch of light – and rarely, through genius, a sudden flambeau – into the bloody yet beautiful labyrinth of human experience, of being.

Here’s a nation, one of the founding pillars was freedom of speech and freedom of expression. And yet, we have imposed upon people restrictions on what they can say, on what they can think. And the media is the largest proponent of this, crucifying people who say things really quite innocently.

For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863…

We cannot know the young child’s personality by studying his systems of interest, for his attention is as yet too labile, his reactions impulsive, and interests unformed.

It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large or permanent contentment from meditation upon the fact that he is better off than others.

I have for myself no conceivable complaint to make, and yet for American literature in general, and its standing in a country where industrialism and finance and science flourish and the only arts that are vital and respected are architecture and the film, I have a considerable complaint.

Nobody ever died of discomfort, yet living in the name of comfort has killed more ideas, more opportunities, more actions, and more growth than everything else combined. Comfort kills!