More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

A simple line painted with the brush can lead to freedom and happiness.

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.

To gain freedom is to gain simplicity.

If you have any notion of where you are going, you will never get anywhere.

When I stand before a canvas, I never know what I'll do, and I am the first one surprised at what comes out.

What I am seeking... is a motionless movement, something equivalent to what is called the eloquence of silence.

I think of my studio as a vegetable garden, where things follow their natural course. They grow, they ripen. You have to graft. You have to water.

For me an object is something living. This cigarette or this box of matches contains a secret life much more intense than that of certain human beings.

If I knew then what I know now I guess it'd make no difference

My father is an apparition, and my mother is semiconscious.

If I were not an atheist, I think I would have to be a Catholic because if it wasn't the forces of natural selection that designed fish, It must have been an Italian.

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

Racists have often used pseudoscience to justify their socially damaging views; watch these films to see how science, by replacing ignorance with knowledge, can undo that damage.

It isn’t defeat, but rather your mental attitude toward it, that whips you.

I have a good life. I have nothing to complain about, and the music is just too interesting.

Windows isn't supposed to make sense, it's supposed to make money.

The most important pathological effects of pollution are extremely delayed and indirect.

I think, you know, the people that have seen my work, I think it speaks to the possibility of getting better, and, I'm sorry, I'm still on the last caller.