In one gallery they actually had a notice which said No Sketching. How obnoxious! I said, How do you think these things got on the walls if there was no sketching?

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.

I've found that I seek out oddballs; I like strange and eccentric people a lot.

The small figures that appear in my paintings are there only because they were there when I was working from nature on my preliminary sketches with pencil.

In common with Michelangelo and Rembrandt I am more interested in the line, its rise and fall, than in color

We came from many roots, and we have many branches.

I realized, in removing or rewriting these jokes, that often the jokes weren't done or that I was using, for me, the curse words as kind of a crutch. So then I just started writing.

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

I get hoes like acorns falling out of trees.

I've learned much, Father, and this above all: that no station in life is above any other, if it's occupied by someone with a good heart.

Our most important legacy will be the contributions we make to the lives of other human beings.

I wish I could write a beautiful book to break those hearts that are soon to cease to exist: a book of faith and small neat worlds and of people who live by the philosophies of popular songs.