Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

One is and is not in the centre of the maelstrom of it all.

There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened.

All that happens is that the destruction of human beings - unless they're Americans - is called collateral damage.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

Language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you ... at any time.

Good writing excites me, and makes life worth living.

I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.

I never think of myself as wise. I think of myself as possessing a critical intelligence which I intend to allow to operate.

Don't forget the earth's about five thousand million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

This particular nurse said, Cancer cells are those which have forgotten how to die. I was so struck by this statement.

Great truths can only be forgotten and can never be falsified.

People with victim mentality spend their energy not on achieving their target but on meaningless complaints

My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.

This is a youth-oriented society and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover.

As soon as you get off stage, that's the most dangerous time for a singer to kiss people because your vocal chords are receptive to any kind of germ.

In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.

I can't get hired in a studio movie. Everything is so uphill.

I love knowing that people are connecting to my lyrics, my music and me.

We cannot go to heaven in featherbeds.

We know great art by its effect on us. If we are prepared to look without preconceptions, without defenses, without haste, then art will change us.