What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.

The past grows gradually around one, like a placenta for dying.

We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.

That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe.

We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice.

The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich.

To be desired is perhaps the closest anybody in this life can reach to feeling immortal.

Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.

Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.

The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can't do is to change its consequences.

The human imagination... has great difficulty in living strictly within the confines of a materialist practice or philosophy. It dreams, like a dog in its basket, of hares in the open.

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

Prayer is learning to know God.

Hope is not a sin, and neither is fidelity.

Airline travel is hours of boredom interrupted by moments of stark terror.

One has to commit their life to music and not expect to get famous or rich doing it.

The awareness of place, space, or condition is not liberation. You can't say what it is, but you can sure say what it isn't.

Because I work in television, I always knew that I loved working with writers. It's very collaborative. You're always in a room full of writers.

The explicable requires the inexplicable. Experience requires the nonexperienceable. The obvious requires the mystical.

If this is the only planet on which not only life, but intelligent life, has arisen, that would be very unusual.

We have good corporals and good sergeants and some good lieutenants and captains, and those are far more important than good generals.