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

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

A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.

Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.

There’s the artist’s intimacy and truthfulness to himself, but an equal intimacy to the Other [the one drawn].

The human imagination… has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.

What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis.

The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

Compassion opposes this order and is therefore best thought of as being in some way supernatural.

(The sight of it as an object stimulates the use of it as an object.) Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguises.

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves.

Capitalism survives by forcing the majority, whom it exploits, to define their own interests as narrowly as possible.

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

These contradictions both hide and increase the natural ambiguity of the photographic image.