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

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 zoo cannot but disappoint.

It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

To be naked is to be oneself.

Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.

The power of the glamorous resides in their supposed happiness: the power of the bureaucrat in his supposed authority.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

[O]ften 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.

This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves.

As Nelson Mandela has pointed out, boycott is not a principle, it is a tactic depending upon circumstances.

What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.