I don't know if I work in order to do something, or in order to know why I can't do what I want to do.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.

When I make my drawings... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.

Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

In writing a novel, when in doubt, have two guys come through the door with guns.

This is the heart of prayer—not getting things from God, but getting God.

The trap had a ghastly perfection

I ran to my marriage, I was happily ready to take on marriage.

Above all things, the plainsmen had to have in instinct for direction. I never had a compass in my life, but I was never lost.

Prophets are so dangerous because they cry in season and out of season, politely and impolitely, loud and long.

My first love is the sport, and it will always be my priority.

People don't really change. Not fundamentally. When they surprise us, it is because we failed to recognize their potentialities.

Denying our weaknesses is neither power, nor protection. We cannot overcome those disabling parts of our own nature which in fact steal our power away, if we do not acknowledge they exist.

Without a shadow of doubt, Trafalgar Square has to be one of the most crap urban public spaces in the world.