“We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.”

May Heaven exist, even if my place is Hell.

Being with you and not being with you is the only way I have to measure time.

What I’m really concerned about is reaching one person. And that person may be myself for all I know.

The word happiness exists in every language; it is plausible the thing itself exists.

Every man should be capable of all ideas.

I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.

To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.

Time is the substance from which I am made. Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

The future has no other reality than as present hope, and the past is no more than present memory.

There is no point in being overwhelmed by the appalling total of human sufferring; such a total does not exist. Neither poverty nor pain is accumulable.

The earth we inhabit is an error, an incompetent parody. Mirrors and paternity are abominable because they multiply and affirm it.

I think of reading a book as no less an experience than travelling or falling in love.

Art is very mysterious. I wonder if you can really do any damage to art. I think that when we’re writing, something comes through or should come through, in spite of our theories. So theories are not really important.

It’s a shame that we have to choose between two such second-rate countries as the USSR and the USA.

To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal.

Reality is not always probable, or likely.

You have so many museums in the West, and so many shows, you need somebody to show the work, otherwise it’s empty.

I don’t think China has professional museums – not in the past, present, or near future.

People in general see galleries and museums as family-appropriate excursions.

Art exhibitions would be less censored if they were rated, G or NC-17, like movies.

The fact is that the British Museum had a complete specimen of a dodo in their collection up until the 18th century

All over Budapest, statues have been replaced, museum exhibits have been redone, to turn ethnic Hungarians, not Jews, into the prime victims of the Germans during World War II.

Things have gotten openly more extreme in the last few years. I was lecturing in Hungary, whose prime minister, Victor Orban, is an example of this trend.

Now almost every artist outside of New York is connected with some school or some museum school, and even in New York the majority are.