“In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.”

What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else.

The more you fail, the more you succeed. It is only when everything is lost and – instead of giving up – you go on, that you experience the momentary prospect of some slight progress. Suddenly you have the feeling – be it an illusion or not – that something new has opened up.

When I see a head from a great distance, it ceases to be a sphere and becomes an extreme confusion falling down into the abyss.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

It was always disappointing to see that what I could really master in terms of form boiled down to so little.

All I can do will only ever be a faint image of what I see and my success will always be less than my failure or perhaps equal to the failure.

That’s the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

The human face is as strange to me as a countenance, which, the more one looks at it, the more it closes itself off and escapes by the steps of unknown stairways.

Art is the residue of vision.

Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.

Only reality interests me now and I know I could spend the rest of my life in copying a chair.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

In a fire, between a Rembrandt and a cat, I would save the cat.

The more I work, the more I see things differently, that is, everything gains in grandeur every day, becomes more and more unknown, more and more beautiful. The closer I come, the grander it is, the more remote it is.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

I don’t know who I am or who I was. I know it less than ever. I do and I don’t identify myself with myself. Everything is totally contradictory, but maybe I have remained exactly as I was as a small boy of twelve.

When a man jumps out of a ten-story building.

I’m trying to get some building work done at the moment.

Filthy McNasty’s and I said, I need these things and now fill it in with other iconic buildings.

I’ve learned over decades of building that a deadline is a potent tool for problem-solving.

And there are days when just going into work and building something from someone else’s drawing sounds like going back to heaven.

It always surprises me when donors who operate successful businesses assume that just building a school structure means that a community now has access to education.

Closeness to another person is like a fear of falling off a building to me. It’s really, like, physically painful, and it’s a brand of crazy I don’t appreciate having.

But as I’ve gotten older, and I look at the world, I think there’s a lot of ways in which that kind of building up from the smallest building blocks doesn’t actually account for the world.