“Real art has the capacity to make us nervous.”

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

One can never ask anyone to change a feeling.

Being in love means being willing to ruin yourself for the other person.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once, and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.

The fear of becoming old is born of the recognition that one is not living now the life that one wishes.

It hurts to love. It’s like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.

Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos.

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.

It is not the position, but the disposition.

A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.

All my life I’ve been looking for someone intelligent to talk to.

I don’t care about someone being intelligent; any situation between people, when they are really human with each other, produces ‘intelligence.

My library is an archive of longings.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Some people create with words or with music or with a brush and paints. I like to make something beautiful when I run.

That’s something I like about drag – I get to do everything. Collaborative arts are hard for me because I don’t really like to relinquish control.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Drag Race’ doesn’t claim to represent drag as a whole. ‘Drag Race’ is a reality show. If you see real drag shows, we just do drag and respect each other’s art and who your real identity is – name, gender, hair color, anything.

Use your art to fight.

We had forgotten the art of using silence to convey emotions in our films and that’s what you seem to have mastered. You’ve used silence to great advantage in the film. It’s brilliant.

There is no art which government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.

The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with beauty and truth.