“What do drawings mean to me? I really don’t know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don’t think happens with any other activity.”

Advertising is not merely an assembly of competing messages; it is a language itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal

It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours.

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

The contradiction in perspective was that it structured all images of reality to address a single spectator who, unlike God, could only be in one place at a time.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.

For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.

Pleasure and pain need to be considered together; they are inseparable. Yet the space filled by each is perhaps different. Pleasure, defined as a sense of gratification, is essential for nature

Compare the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama.

All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget. In this – as in other ways – they are the opposite of paintings.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

We can become anything. That is why injustice is impossible here. There may be the accident of birth, there is no accident of death. Nothing forces us to remain what we were.

Protest and anger practically always derives from hope, and the shouting out against injustice is always in the hope of those injustices being somewhat corrected and a little more justice established.

Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.

Today the discredit of words is very great.

I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten.

Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.

I don’t have an ego that makes me believe the world revolves around me. I am not self-absorbed.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.

The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.

You and your opponent are one. There is a coexisting relationship between you. You coexist with your opponent and become his complement, absorbing his attack and using his force to overcome him.

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is visible labor and there is invisible labor.

The prime function of the children’s book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it.

Absorb ideas from every source.