Taste for things of the past evolves, doesn't it? What was a masterpiece a hundred years ago is no longer so today.

The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.

I've been fifty thousand times to the Louvre. I have copied everything in drawing, trying to understand.

In a burning building I would save a cat before a Rembrandt.

When I make my drawings... the path traced by my pencil on the sheet of paper is, to some extent, analogous to the gesture of a man groping his way in the darkness.

That's the terrible thing: the more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it.

It is impossible to do a thing the way I see it because the closer I get the more differently I see.

Failure is my best friend. If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.

Artistically I am still a child with a whole life ahead of me to discover and create. I want something, but I won't know what it is until I succeed in doing it.

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

The form is always the measure of the obsession.

Red sky at night, the city's alight.

All wish to be learned but no one is willing to pay the price.

I never wanted to be famous and the only part I like is that it means people are reading my books and listening to me on TV and radio.

You have to get past the pleasure stage, until you reach the stage of tears.

The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music; the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definitiveness.

Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.

I never thought I was breaking a glass ceiling. I just had to do what I had to do, and it never occurred to me not to.

Government has no resources of its own. Government can only give to us what it has previously taken from us.

Sometimes, kismet happens.