“Compassion has no place in the natural order of the world which operates on the basis of necessity.”

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.

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labor of reassembling what has been scattered.

Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

She is meant to imagine herself transformed by the product into an object of envy for others, an envy which will then justify her loving herself.

We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

Later alone it wore poems for clothes. Like a shirt I carried on my back the poetry I had read. So I lived for half a century until wordlessly we met. From my shirt on the back of the chair I learn tonight how many years of learning by heart I waited for you.

The air passenger screening system Mexico has in place involves these checks against US national security and criminal data bases.

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history.

I contact Allah the Holy the Merciful on a daily basis.

Each department and institution has its own authorities and responsibilities, and they act on that basis.

It began early in the revolution. It was a process that was unfolding on a daily basis. We expected the system to be dispensing justice, but every day that passed by.

The whole basis of my singing is feeling. Unless I feel something, I can’t sing.

I refuse to be released on the basis of a ‘condition for negotiations’ and I will not accept the price for my freedom to be several meters of the land of Palestine, the land that we have fought for and been imprisoned for.

This is your court and you possess the force to celebrate the trial and convict me on the basis of your lists of accusations.