Sweetness is the opposite of machismo, which is everywhere-and I really don't get on with machismo. I'm interested in sensitivity, and weakness, and fear, and anxiety, because I think that, at the end of the day, behind our masks, that's what we are.

The very act of drawing an object, however badly, swiftly takes the drawer from a woolly sense of what the object looks like to a precise awareness of its component parts and particularities.

I learnt to stop fantasising about the perfect job or the perfect relationship because that can actually be an excuse for not living.

It is perhaps when our lives are at their most problematic that we are likely to be most receptive to beautiful things.

A world where a majority had imbibed the lessons implicit within tragic art would be one in which the consequences of our failures would necessarily cease to weigh upon us so heavily.

The finest proof of our loyalty toward one another was our monstrous disloyalties towards everyone else.

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.