“It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.”

The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.

Everything in life, is a question of drawing a life, John, and you have to decide for yourself where to draw it.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.

Those who first invented and then named the constellations were storytellers.

The woman’s sexual passion needs to be minimized, so that the spectator may feel that he has the monopoly on such passion

Traditional Chinese art looked at the Earth from a Confucian mountain top;

In the average European oil painting of the nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator in front of the picture and he is presumed to be a man.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget.

In the modern world, in which thousands of people are dying every hour as a consequence of politics, no writing anywhere can begin to be credible unless it is informed by political awareness and principles.

Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.

Without ethics man has no future. This is to say mankind without them cannot be itself.

A man’s presence suggests what he is capable of doing to you or for you.

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.

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

Man, me and Biggie were the biggest artists in New York. When he passed, I was so messed up. My attitude was messed up about him dying. There was an East-West thing back then, and I was in war mode.

I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.

Some piece of ourselves, not necessarily our consciousness, but some piece of ourselves gets passed on and on and on.

Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic.

The soul is not the body and it may be in one body or in another, and pass from body to body.

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won’t fail to see a chance to meddle.

I pass for a hypersensitive, reclusive neurotic, which I may well be, but I hope the year won’t come when my anxieties and fatigue will destroy my love of this life, of all the things that inspire me–a line of music, a face in a Vermeer portrait, a character in an opera, or a model born in Harlem.

After the planet becomes theirs, many millions of years will have to pass before a beetle particularly loved by God, at the end of its calculations will find written on a sheet of paper in letters of fire that energy is equal to the mass multiplied by the square of the velocity of light.