I was never that interested in movies. I was interested in them as a thing, but I didn't want to make movies. I always wanted to draw and paint.

I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.

What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.

If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.

Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.

Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.

In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.

Norway was occupied by the Germans in the Second World War, and I've met a lot of people who had to live through that occupation in varying degrees.

All men have talents. Some build, some paint, some write, some fight. For me it is different.

I have some women friends but I prefer men. Dont trust women. There is a built-in competition between women.

The most important lesson we can learn is how to pray. Prayers do not die, prayers live before God, and God's heart is set on them.

The whole secret of the study of nature lies in learning how to use one's eyes.

Next to a good meal and possibly a long night's sleep the greatest morale builder ... is clothes.

because talent alone doesn't make an artist

It is the part of cowardliness, and not of virtue, to seek to squat itself in some hollow lurking hole, or to hide herself under some massive tomb, thereby to shun the strokes of fortune.

Managing university finances is very tricky business. We're nonprofits. We're not supposed to accumulate large surpluses.

The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.