“Poverty has a home in Africalike a quiet second skin.It may be the only place on earth where it is worn with unconscious dignity.”

I am building a stairway to the stars. I have the authority to take the whole of mankind up there with me. That is why I write.

People with really weak characters cause an immense amount of suffering in the world. They destroy whole civilisations.

A discipline I have observed is an attitude of love and reverence to people.

It seemed to be a makeshift replacement for love, absenting oneself from stifling atmospheres, because love basically was a torrential storm of feeling; it thrived only in partnership with laughing generosity and truthfulness.

Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.

Money will hit me at a big off-period and genius will hit me in starvation, that is, I often get the money when I don’t think I deserve it and have been lolling around for days and days thinking the most abysmal thoughts.

After all, film is so porous, and to my mind, so oddly occult, that I think that film itself absorbs odd energies like a living skin.

At the core of my work there is this eternal back-and-forth between being confined to one’s own individuality and that longing to be part of the other, the outside world: the impossibility of ever being able to get beneath another person’s skin.

My great grandma always told me to drink a lot of milk because it’s good for the skin.

First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled in aerosol form.

[She] was made up of skin and bones and hate and crazy, and hate and crazy don’t weigh anything.

You have to create love and affection for your body, for what it can do for you. Love must be incarnated in the smallest pore of the skin, the smallest cell of the body to make them intelligent so they can collaborate with all the other ones, in the big republic of the body. This love must radiate from you to others.

The evocative power of the drum can be compared to the Trinity. The drum’s frame comes from the trunk of a tree, and that tree has a spirit. It is not dead wood. There is also spirit in the animal skin. If there wasn’t, it would not produce sound. Those, plus the spirit of the person playing become an irresistible force.

Me, when I’m utterly exhausted by it all, when my skin breaks out, on those lonely evenings when I call my friends again and again and nobody’s home, then I despise my own life – my birth, my upbringing, everything.