My work is not about my life history. It's not about the story of my neurosis

One cannot set out to make a work that's spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?

A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already

Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it's inside out, red.

The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.

All ideas grow out of other ideas

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.

I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.

One doesn't make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer

That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.

No matter how hard life is, don't lose hope

Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.

Tomorrow belongs to those who are sincerely learning and loving today.

I loved you unabashedly in the rain, you were real, raw, accustomed to pain. I loved you mostly in the rain, where you exposed your broken soul, unashamed, dancing despite it all.

That's the thing about a great book. Every time you read it, it's different, because you're different. You've changed since the last time you picked it up, things have happened to you.

Today cinema can place all its talent, all its technology in the service of reanimating what it itself contributed to liquidating. It only resurrects ghosts, and it itself is lost therein.

What happened out there?”“I almost got quarking toasted by a dragon.”“A dragon, ” he repeats, scandalized. “Are you mad? Or have you been skulking around the bars of Barbary XIII?

There is some comfort in dying surrounded by one's children.

...those of us who write for children are called, not to do something to a child, but be someone for a child.

Biggest lesson I've ever had in life is that blues had a baby and they named it rock 'n' roll.