“For women, history does not exist. Murasaki, Sappho, and Madame Lafayette might be their own contemporaries.”

Life is pain and the enjoyment of love is an anesthetic.

The man who cannot live with charity, sharing other men’s pain, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable anguish.

It is not that things happen to each of us according to his fate, but that he interprets what has happened, if he has power to do so, according to his sense of his own destiny.

We care so little of other people than even Christianity urges us to do good for the love of God.

It is stupid to grieve for the loss of a girl friend: you might never have met her, so you can do without her.

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

When writing poetry, it is not that produces a bright idea, but the bright idea that kindles the fire of.

When you dream, you are an author, but you do not know how it will end.

Life without smoking is like the smoke without the roast.

There comes a day when, for someone who has persecuted us, we feel only indifference, a weariness at his stupidity. Then we forgive him.

Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

Perfect behavior is born of complete indifference. Perhaps this is why we always love madly someone who treats us with indifference.

Here’s the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.

Life is not a search for experience, but for ourselves. Having discovered our own fundamental level we realize that it conforms to our own destiny and we find peace.

Will power is only the tensile strength of one’s own disposition. One cannot increase it by a single ounce.

In China, we don’t have any contemporary art museums. Until a few years ago, we didn’t even have a gallery.

The boundaries between contemporary art and cinema are so rigid. It’s unbelievable.

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done – people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway – in France we have Nathalie Sarraute – and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater.

A brilliant inquiry into the contemporary Iranian predicament and what it means for the world.

Part of what attracted me to the village was it had a lot of parallels to contemporary issues.

This is what creates the perception that contemporary art is shocking or suspicious.

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist…

Contemporary art photography, or, more specifically, what I would term mainstream art photography, represents for the most part the mining of an exhausted lode.