When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies

Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.

Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

Piers is always going on about how he hated Stowe. As if that solves everything, as if to hate something means it can't have affected you.

I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.

The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.

I love honesty and freedom and giving. I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.

He said, one has to learn that painting well - in the academic and technical sense - comes right at the bottom of the list. I mean, you've got that ability. So have thousands.

If there is a God he's a great loathsome spider in the darkness.

I hate beyond hate.

My mom was a great tennis player, and I remember being six or seven years old watching Steffi Graf and Monica Seles in Wimbledon in my house. I've always been a tennis fan.

There is a peculiar contradiction in trying to be a member of a republic while believing that the universe is a monarchy.

The goal of scientists is you hope that the thing you're working on is bigger than the thing you're pipetting into that tube at the moment.

A lot of people think theatre must be much harder work than film, but anything histrionic or superfluous gets seen on camera so you have to work to distil it into a complete sense of what's true.

Poor me, poor me, pour me another.

I think the monarchy today is. . . mildly interesting and largely harmless. I can't find I can get very heated about it. In the next couple of generations, it is bound to go.

Wine is a cunning wrestler.

Junk runs in the family. My granddad was a junk man in St. Louis and so was my uncle.

If you think about my filmography, I have never done a movie that a kid could go see, except for Iron Giant, and I'm not even on the screen.

I knew a lot about what I did when I was 20. I had read a lot, and I aspired to learn everything I could about the subject.