“If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.”

The animal has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas are specifically addressed to man.

One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.

The heart of Paris is like nothing so much as the unending interior of a house.

It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

The essence of songs is neither vocal nor cerebral but organic.

The spectator-buyer is meant to envy herself as she will become if she buys the product.

All creation is in the art of seeing.

Picasso drawings are like that… the Rembrandts are like that. The artist who most often did that was Van Gogh.

Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

The impulse to paint comes neither from observation nor from the soul (which is probably blind) but from an encounter: the encounter between painter and model: even if the model is a mountain or a shelf of empty medicine bottles.

Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one.

If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.

The strange power of art is sometimes it can show that what people have in common is more urgent than what differentiates them. It seems to me it’s something that theatre can do, but it’s rare; it’s very rare.

You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest – if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

People will never fight for your freedom if you have not given evidence that you are prepared to fight for it yourself.

Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning, and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

There are things that are a given, that you’ve already established, and obviously, visually, certain iconic things that can’t be completely removed, like a certain hat or a certain coat in my case.

There is no truth which cannot be given in fifty words; the truth is always concise.

But forgiveness must not only be given but received also.

I wasn’t supported, I wasn’t given any self-esteem.

Everybody who talks to a newspaper has a motive. That’s just a given. And good reporters always, repeat always, probe to find out what that motive is.

That is the exciting thing: I don’t know what God has given me for tomorrow.