“We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.”

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 contrasts between the haves and have-nots is so complicated.

It’s sort of a combination between that and having the foundation that my mother gave me.

I think it’s important that we run that tension between the way things are.

It is one thing to believe in justification by faith.

This contest between the secular and religious visions of government is really the main choice to be made

Far too many people place way too much importance on the sarcasm instead of the talking, in and of itself, as a precious shared experience between people.

You have the unenviable choice between being dropped off last or being dropped off first and having a bunch of losers who can’t afford cab fare and have no friends or loved ones with cars knowing exactly where you live.

This is the difference between a pastime and a passion. I like to play golf, but I am not a golfer. I like to cook, but I am not a chef. I don’t just like to run. I am a runner. It is a passion