You would think death was an optional extra nowadays. Nobody wants to tick that box.

I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.

What an artist is trying to do for people is bring them closer to something, because of course art is about sharing. You wouldn't be an artist unless you wanted to share an experience, a thought.

If you see the world as beautiful, thrilling and mysterious, as I think I do, then you feel quite alive.

Listening is a positive act: you have to put yourself out to do it.

Faces are the most interesting things we see; other people fascinate me, and the most interesting aspect of other people - the point where we go inside them - is the face. It tells all.

The camera can't see space. It sees surfaces. People see space, which is much more interesting.

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.

In art, new ways of seeing mean new ways of feeling; you can't divorce the two, as, we are now aware, you cannot have time without space and space without time.

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard.

The urge to draw must be quite deep within us, because children love to do it.

you come to understand that history might be, as Thomas Carlyle put it, “a distillation of rumor, ” or, as Napoleon said, “a set of lies generally agreed upon

Perhaps it's impolite to die so flippantly, after all she's done for me.

If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.

It's easier to find a new audience than to write a new speech.

You do feel kind of nervous about any film you take on.

The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.

I love the written word; I love when someone takes the time or leaves you a note or sends a letter.

I grew up in a very small, rural country town, and we didn't really have 'the arts.'

I needed to go . . . the pull of Everest was stronger for me than any force on earth.

O white-robed Angel, guide my timorous hand to write as on a lofty rock with iron pen the words of truth, that all who pass may read.