“And perhaps there is none now; but we will have to make it, we who want an end to suffering, who want to change the laws of history, if we are not to give ourselves away.”

Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.

The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.

The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, isn’t there a difficulty of saying ‘we’? You cannot speak for me.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.

There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence

Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.

I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.

One night of love don’t make up for six nights alone. But I’d rather have one than none Lord, cause I’m flesh and bone.

Our fate is determined by how far we are prepared to push ourselves to stay alive – the decisions we make to survive. We must do whatever it takes to endure and make it through alive.

There is almost nothing you can say that holds up as a generalization, because it depends on too many factors: size, modulation, the rest of the field, a certain consistency that color has with forms, and the statement you’re trying to make.

When I move from being a cameraman to being a director I looked at a lot of other cameramen who tried to make the move. And in each case they moved up their camera operator to be the DP, which really meant they didn’t want to give up being the DP, and really wanted to do both.

I am the maker of my own fortune, and Oh! that I could make that of my Red People, and of my country, as great as the conceptions of my mind, when I think of the spirit that rules the universe.

If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all. And if you do have to say it, make it really funny so I can screenshot it and save it for later.

You make history when you do business.

The audience is your first collaborator with the material. If that makes sense.