“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.”

The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

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.

There is no one on earth who knew you from the day you were born; who knew why you cried, or when you’d had enough food; who knew exactly what to say when you were hurting.

That aesthetic of the Star Wars universe: the do-it-yourself, hotrod ethic that George Lucas exported from his childhood, is exactly the same kind of soul behind what we do and build for the show.

I translated the novel and still it remains a mystery as to how exactly how this works. Noll thinks more like an experimental filmmaker than a novelist.

If we had been there listening, we still might not have been able to determine exactly what Stanton said. All we know for sure is that everyone was weeping, and the room was full.

Paris, on the other hand, looked exactly as it was supposed to look. It wore its heart on its sleeve, and the strange thing was that the heart it wore so openly was in other ways so closed-mysterious, uninviting.

You can tune in at any time and know exactly where you are in the story arc because it’s pretty much the same every week.

I feel right now exactly the way I felt after I finished mixing my first solo album ‘New York Groove’.

I believe nuclear energy in Jordan will be done in such a way where it is a public-private partnership so everyone can see exactly what’s going on.