What do drawings mean to me? I really don't know. The activity absorbs me. I forget everything else in a way that I don't think happens with any other activity.

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.

Permissiveness is the principle of treating children as if they were adults

If we have not quiet in our minds, outward comfort will do no more for us than a golden slipper on a gouty foot.

I have not lived as a woman. I have lived as a man. I've just done what I damn well wanted to, and I've made enough money to support myself, and ain't afraid of being alone.

You only change what you understand. What you do not understand and are not aware of, you repress. You dont change. But when you understand it, it changes.

If my Dad doesn't like you, you will know. My Mom is just too innocent to ever lie. She doesn't even cuss.

In England, your life is your life.

Everybody is doing you a favor when you're doing a documentary. You can't pressure them into it.

Maybe they continued to agree with Archie Bunker - as I said earlier, you can't change people's minds, but you can get them to think.

Better never trouble trouble until trouble troubles you; for you only make your trouble double trouble when you do.

So what's your second suggestion?" "Tread lightly." "That's it? That's the best advice you can give me?" "All right, tread very lightly.