Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

It can happen that a book, unlike its authors, grows younger as the years pass.

A cigarette is a breathing space. It makes a parenthesis. The time of a cigarette is a parenthesis, and if it is shared, you are both in that parenthesis. Its like a proscenium arch for a dialogue.

It is not usually possible in a poem or a story to make the relationship between particular and universal fully explicit. Those who try to do so end up writing parables.

Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.