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

I haven’t been everywhere, but it’s on my list.

A good book is an education of the heart. It enlarges your sense of human possibility what human nature is of what happens in the world. It’s a creator of inwardness.

Self-respect. It would make me lovable. And it’s the secret to good sex.

Art is a form of consciousness.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

Writing for other artists helped me figure out that magic you have to capture to make everyone connect with a song.

I want to be role model for people to be like, ‘I don’t need a major label to be a successful artist and to have a successful song.’

I am not an angel and do not pretend to be. That is not one of my roles. But I am not a devil, either. I am a woman and a serious artist, and I would like so to be judged.

The scientist needs an artistically creative imagination.

For an artist to think in terms of success is like a priest trying to think in terms of success.

The artist shall never run out of paint. Because the artist, my love, never runs out of pain.

You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.

There was a time in my career when I felt like I wasn’t being true to myself. I was being moulded into an artist I wasn’t, and I knew I had to do everything I wanted to do. I think that’s an issue a lot of women face, and men do have it easier in a lot of ways.