I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase. For me, drawing is a lot to do with taking out, with returning to the white of the paper.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

I don't want to die while I still have beautiful reasons to die for.

When I write, I see the character inside out, not outside in.

Virtue often trips and falls on the sharp-edged rock of poverty.

Try not to say, 'I'm a failure.' Instead, ask, 'What can I do better? What did I do wrong?' Then re-approach.

You can't just lecture the poor that they shouldn't riot or go to extremes. You have to make the means of legal redress available.

I married someone 30 years older than me, a doctor, a playboy who had a terrible Don Juan reputation.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Studying cows, pigs and chickens can help an actor develop his character. There are a lot of things I learned from animals. One was that they couldn't hiss or boo me.

When we trust God, He can make the ordinary extraordinary!

The unexpected may annoy us, but may also wake us up.