“The only way [the book can be written] is to set the unbook-the gilt-framed portrait of the book-right there on the altar and sacrifice it, truly sacrifice it.”

We are constantly telling ourselves what we most want to know, and at the same time are deaf to it. Why does envy have such a fierce bite?

Why do we fall silent or get worried just as our story is about to spring out of our control and into its own life? Whose shadow falls across the page?

The antidote to envy is one’s own work. Always one’s own work. Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it. The answers you want can come only from the work itself.

Successful writers are not the ones who write the best sentences. They are the ones who keep writing.

Daily life is always extraordinary when rendered precisely.

Fiction must convince our bodies for it to have any chance of convincing our minds.

The tool of every self-portrait is the mirror. You see yourself in it. Turn it the other way, and you see the world .

With Jane Birkin, we had a scene from a film called Jane B. by Agnès V. – a portrait I made in ’87. We had a casino scene, surrealistic, in which we had some naked people gambling. Jane Birkin was the card dealer and I was the player.

When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.

Cassius and Brutus were the more distinguished for that very circumstance that their portraits were absent.

There is no self-portrait of me.

There is nothing that special to see when looking at me. I’m a painter who paints day in day out, from morning till evening – figure pictures and landscapes, more rarely portraits.

I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.

Every record is a portrait of the band at that time.