There's such a freedom about being an artist... You're not accountable - you're this renegade thing.

I don't want it all to be pretty - it's a combination of loss and gain. Things are born, live and hang in limbo. That's what life's about.

You make an open-ended proposition and the audience completes it somehow. That’s what you hope an artwork to be-a constantly living thing.

The main trouble with this civilized world isn't that we adventure too much, but that we fail to adventure enough.

There's only a certain amount of works you can make, so you have to make only the ones you really want to make. It's all about trying to be as productive as possible.

... rarely if ever does one feel sure one knows enough to go ahead with much of anything new. You bank on faith and courage and the ability to learn on the job.

If I'm not doing the work I want, I usually suffer a psychological allergic reaction and get ill. It niggles when things get out of my control.

New York, forever the port of em- and de-barkation en route to Adventure.

not only have children most certainly a right to their own ambitions, but their own lack of ambitions.

There's something about being in the country that makes you stick out like a sore thumb ? you're an anomaly. But in London there's always someone wilder and woollier.

Cry down materialism all you will, surely one of the thoroughly satisfactory sensations of this world is to feel financially independent.

File under "Hard Truths": the creative muse is fiction. If you sit around waiting for the right moment to create, you will die waiting.

Misery teaches you more than joy.

When I take my kid to school, all the parents stop and stare.

God often works more by the life of the illiterate seeking the things that are God's, than by the ability of the learned seeking the things that are their own.

You know, your species [humans] has the most amazing capacity for self-deception, matched only by its ingenuity in trying to destroy itself.

I know there are reporters who ridicule pundits.

I guess God has a sense of humor, when he had a man that wanted to start his life as a priest, end up marrying a preacher.

It's what I always wanted to do, to show the laughter, the fun, the joy of dance.

I won't show a picture where a person doesn't look beautiful.

When pain has been constant, it has its own momentum and laws. The vital thing is to break its ascendancy over the mind.