I worked in the NHS as a hospital orderly during my national service, and people thought it was a noble service. But over the years it's lost its humanity.

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.

Oh! Death! You are the savior of life.You are the shelter of life.You are the destination of life.You are the beginning and the end of life.You are the center of the circle of life.

They say ol’ man Beach is crazy. And maybe he is. But he goes ahead anyways. He’s the sort of man who knows the only things worth doing are the things might break your heart.

I suppose we all tend to want the impossible. And sometimes in attempting it we achieve something near enough to the impossible to elicit satisfaction.

'Old Tomorrow.'

It is better that some should be unhappy rather than that none should be happy, which would be the case in a general state of equality.

Pleasure causes us to do base actions and pain causes us to abstain from doing noble actions.

I think people are quite surprised that the handwriting I use in my drawings and paintings is my own handwriting. They're slightly shocked when I write them a letter.

Is it not the artist who - like our dreams - dissolves the pretenses that hide us from ourselves, disclosing both our self-serving fantasies and our unsuspected potentialities?

When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the airplane takes off against the wind, not with it.

He liked her; it was as simple as that.