“One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.”

No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people’s pain.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

I envy paranoids; they actually feel people are paying attention to them.

I’m only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.

Books are funny little portable pieces of thought.

Photographers are always imposing.

I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own.

Intelligence is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas.

All understanding begins with our not accepting the world as it appears.

In ‘life,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my work. In ‘work,’ I don’t want to be reduced to my life.

Most people in this society who aren’t actively mad are, at best, reformed or potential lunatics.

Life is a movie; death is a photograph.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.

At the end of the day, I don’t know what makes any artist say what he says. Everyone has a reason for whatever it is they do.

The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is another question.

Even though Prince wasn’t rapping and it was a whole different era, it shows how artists expressed themselves without saying too much, and that was the real beauty of the art.

To be an artist or a writer is to be this weird thing – a hand worker in an era of mass production.

Let not a man do what his sense of right bids him not to do, nor desire what it forbids him to desire. This is sufficient. The skillful artist will not alter his measures for the sake of a stupid workman.

I pay tribute to the writing always. The writer is a creative artist and the director is an interpretive artist and the actors are interpretive. You take zero and make it into something, that’s always amazing to me.

The out-of-work actor wears out more than shoe leather. The very sensibilities that make him an artist are shattered by the disregard he is shown as a human being.

Temperament is something that is an integral part of the artist. Not temper, temperament. There is a vast difference.