“Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry… to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.”

The zoo cannot but disappoint. The public purpose of zoos is to offer visitors the opportunity of looking at animals.

History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past

When he painted a road, the roadmakers were there in his imagination, when he painted the turned earth of a ploughed field, the gesture of the blade turning the earth was included in his own act.

We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.

I wanted to write about looking at the world, so it’s more about helping people, or persuading people, to see what is around us; both the marvellous and the terrible.

The true content of a photograph is invisible, for it derives from a play, not with form, but with time.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Japanese art looked closely around screens; Italian Renaissance art surveyed conquered nature through the window or door-frame of a palace.

Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.

The happiness of being envied is glamour. Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely upon not sharing your experience with those who envy you.

Hair is associated with sexual power. With passion.

Never chain your dogs together with sausages. One must accustom one’s self to be bored.

You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.

The opposite of love is not to hate but to separate. If love and hate have something in common it is because, in both cases, their energy is that of bringing and holding together

If everything that existed were continually being photographed, every photograph would become meaningless.

Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily media add to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical opinion is often orphaned in the present.

The Lord has shown me that I can do anything, but that He has said, apart from Me ye can do nothing. So it comes to this, that everything I have done, and can still do apart from Him is nothing!

I don’t want to advise anyone to do anything, apart from try and stay alive. That’s my advice – don’t die.

I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them. I take them apart.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

Who has not sat before his own heart’s curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.

It’s going to take a shoehorn to prise these two teams apart

Was sort of intellectually shocked. Contagion is the critical phenomenon which causes the thing to fall apart.

That which once united man Now drives him apart.