“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.”

Photographs bear witness to a human choice being exercised in a given situation.

A tactic which allows people, as distinct from their elected but often craven governments, to apply a certain pressure on those wielding power in what they, the boycotters, consider to be an unjust or immoral way.

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.

We add to it every now and then. It includes things like never date a guy whose computer costs more than his car (you’ll never get him to pay attention to you except over instant messages)

I rush to add that I find the Web infinitely useful for rustling up information, settling arguments or locating the legends of rock stars.

Expect nothing in return. Over time, these random acts of kindness will really add

The shuttle is the worst $20 you’ll ever save. It adds 90 minutes to whatever a Town Car or cab would have been.

Letting go is even more important than adding.

Love shouldn’t make our choices for us; it should just add importance to our choices.

When valuing a startup, add $500k for every engineer, and subtract $250k for every MBA.

One does not substitute oneself for the past, one merely adds to it a new link.