Manners are love in a cool climate.

Though intelligence is powerless to modify character, it is a dab hand at finding euphemisms for its weaknesses.

I simply haven't the nerve to imagine a being, a force, a cause which keeps the planets revolving in their orbits and then suddenly stops in order to give me a bicycle with three speeds.

Posing was the first job I did in which I understood what I was doing.

In an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast.

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

The poverty from which I have suffered could be diagnosed as 'Soho' poverty. It comes from having the airs and graces of a genius and no talent.

Vice is its own reward.

Never keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level.

No effort is required to define or even attain happiness, but enormous concentration is needed to abandon everything else.

Extreme emotional pain has a profound effect on the body. I witnessed my already frail body become even more toxic and plundered.

And the best sort of villain is smart and subtle and so very tricky that you don't even know he's the villain, because he thinks himself the hero in his own story.

When thinking won't cure fear action will.

At the age of fifteen my grandmother became the concubine of a warlord general.

The violinist must possess the poet's gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within.

We have now just enshrined, as soon as I sign this bill, the core principle that everybody should have some basic security when it comes to their healthcare.

The yoga of love is for those who want an all-consuming relationship with their teacher. They see the teacher as an extension of God, of eternity - which all of us are.

A loud voice is not always angry; a soft voice not always to be dismissed; and a well-placed silence can be the indisputable last word.

The whole idea of ideas in art is useless. Only have ideas about form.

I often use an old canvas and I particularly enjoy painting over something I've already done, allowing bits to come jumping through accidentally.