I think all great innovations are built on rejections.

True strength is delicate.

I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.

When you put things together, things that other people have thrown out, you’re really bringing them to life – a spiritual life that surpasses the life for which they were originally created.

No matter how individual we humans are, we are a composite of everything we are aware of. We are a mirror of our times.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

Most of us have to be transplanted before we blossom.

You take a painting, you have a white, virginal piece of canvas that is the world of purity, and then you put your imagery on it, and you try to bring it back to the original purity.

It gave me great pleasure to think that I could take wood, make it good, and make people like Rockefeller buy it with paper money.

I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony.

A whisper can be stronger, as an atom is stronger, than a whole mountain.

Watch the little ones around you

Canada is a society rather than a nation.

Since I was younger I've been making the best out of nothing.

Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.

I believe that a lot of our striving after the symbols and levers of success is due to a basic insecurity, a need to prove ourselves. That done, grown up at last, we are free to stop pretending.

Every man is his own Pygmalion, and spends his life fashioning himself. And in fashioning himself, for good or ill, he fashions the human race and its future.

...a young nurse is standing close behind me wondering whether she is being drawn by my power or her charity.

Brutal men with unlimited power are the same all over the world

It seems strange to me that someone thought of making marble statues.

Eyes open, then," I say, tapping the skin between my eyebrows. I don’t really need her eyes to be on mine, but I feel better when they are.