I want to unfold.I don’t want to be folded anywhere, because where I am folded, there I am a lie.

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world.

If we surrenderedto earth's intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.

I love the dark hours of my being.My mind deepens into them.There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough.

Grace is freely given by God.

In sitting meditation, we train in mindfulness and unconditional friendliness: in being steadfast with our bodies, our emotions, our thoughts.

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

Probably one of the reasons I don't work in the mainstream anymore is that I'm only interested in making the stuff I want to make

I found fear stimulating. Particularly after you've done something that you'd been frightened of at the time, but you carried through and did the job.

The cold, basic truth is that you are a vital and necessary part of this world

I have condemned any organizer of war, regardless of his rank or nationality.

The great enemy of the life of faith in God is not sin, but the good which is not good enough. The good is always the enemy of the best.

Even when I was at CIA, I'd go to visit foreign leaders and I'd say, 'You know, I'm not a diplomat. I'm just an old CIA guy'... I said, 'If I wanted to be diplomatic, I'd have been a diplomat.'

Advancing bourgeois society liquidates memory, time, recollection as irrational leftovers of the past.