“Common-sense is part of the home-made ideology of those who have been deprived of fundamental learning, of those who have been kept ignorant.”

Photography, because it stops the flow of life, is always flirting with death.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.

The stars threaded on that line were like events threaded on a narrative. Imagining the constellations did not of course change the stars, nor did it change the black emptiness that surrounds them. What it changed was the way people read the night sky.

Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.

My heart born naked was swaddled in lullabies.

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.

A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.

The unsung, impersonal world remains outside, on the other surface of a placenta. All songs, even when their content or rendering is strongly masculine, operate maternally.

Yet nowherein a zoo can a stranger encounter the look of an animal. At the most, the animal’s gaze flickers and passes on. They look sideways. They look blindly beyond.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss.

The extreme proposition on which Giacometti based all his mature work was that no reality… could ever be shared. This is why he believed it impossible for a work to be finished. This is why the content of any work is not the nature of the figure or head portrayed but the incomplete history of him staring at it.

For those who are behind the curtain, landmarks are no longer only geographic but also biographical and personal

All publicity works upon anxiety.

Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.

In sum, simply a business from which those involved propose to derive a steady profit for their own self-love.

If someone tried to deprive you of your rights, you’ve got to resist it. You’ve got to resent it. You’ve got to fight against it.

After a while the car becomes just another thing that he owns. Moreover, when his neighbor next door buys two cars, in an instant our man feels wretchedly poor and deprived.

But such a tiny and trivial thing as an umbrella can deprive you of the sight of such a stupendous fact as the sun.

I definitely gravitate towards things like vegetables, chicken, brown rice, but I don’t deprive myself of anything. If I want a Sprinkles cupcake, I’m having a Sprinkles cupcake. But I’m not going to have one every day… you just have to have a sensible outlook on all of it.

Adversity deprives us of our judgment.

I never can understand how anyone can not smoke it deprives a man of the best part of life. With a good cigar in his mouth a man is perfectly safe, nothing can touch him, literally.

Without you I am like a plant deprived of sunshine wishing it could grow.