“I love the abstract, delicate, profound, vague, voluptuously wordless sensation of living ecstatically.”

Life is a full circle, widening until it joins the circle motions of the infinite.

In chaos, there is fertility.

There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do.

You cannot save people, you can only love them.

It was while helping others to be free that I gained my own freedom.

Luxury is not a necessity to me, but beautiful and good things are.

What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.

What everyone forgets is that passion is not merely a heightened sensual fusion but a way of life which produces, as in the mystics, an ecstatic awareness of the whole of life.

I must be a mermaid, Rango. I have no fear of depths and a great fear of shallow living.

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

When you make a world tolerable for yourself, you make a world tolerable for others.

Those who cannot live fully often become destroyers of life.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

She lacks confidence, she craves admiration insatiably. She lives on the reflections of herself in the eyes of others. She does not dare to be herself.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

Tranquillity is contagious, peace is contagious. One only thinks of the contagiousness of illness, but there is the contagion of serenity and joy.

What if a girl grew up like a boy, with marriage an abstract, someday thought, a thing to think about when she became an adult, a thing she could do, or not do, depending? What would that look and feel like?

I think everybody deserves freedom. Freedom is such an abstract word, but it’s all we need.

In my case, I was stuck there for quite a while. New York is large enough to be a very abstract city, so nobody cares.

Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern.

A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It’s the most abstract of all art expression.

Abstract art: a construction site for high fashion, for advertising, for furniture.

The abstract music is just more interesting because it doesn’t really have anything to say, but if it is good, it creates thoughts and feelings, and I enjoy that. For me, once the music creates those thoughts and feelings, I begin to write a song about it.

I never abstract from nature; I never consciously think of nature when I paint.