“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”

It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at bottom.

And there I sat, long long ago, waiting for the world to know me.

She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom.

To do nothing is the way to be nothing.

I have come to see the nonsense of attempting to describe fine scenery. There is no such possibility. If scenery could be adequately reproduced in words, there would have been no need of God’s making it in reality.

No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

This above all: be true, be true, be true.

Ugliness without tact is horrible.

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may going to prove one’s self a fool.

Life is made up of marble and mud.

Sunlight is painting.

Nobody will use other people’s experience, nor have any of his own till it is too late to use it.

This world owes all its forward impulses to people ill at ease.

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along with it the utmost passion of her heart!

Every individual has a place to fill in the world and is important in some respect whether he chooses to be so or not.

There’s such a wealth of arts and styles within the guitar… flamenco, jazz, rock, blues. You name it, it’s there. In the early days my dream was to fuse all those styles. Now composing has become just as important.

I’m all about supporting anyone whose art is also the way they make their living.

I believe in continuing to put love and kindness and compassion and art into the world.

Filmmaking is such a collaborative piece of art that you can’t look to one person – you couldn’t look to me, you couldn’t say, ‘Because Vin’s in it, it’s this or that.’ It’s really all of us coming together for that period of time to try and make magic.

I do think that drugs and alcohol have been glorified and exoticized in such a way that it gets into the art world.

I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I’ve just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it’s not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

I discovered martial arts, first judo and then karate.