All nationalisms are at heart deeply concerned with names: with the most immaterial and original human invention. Those who dismiss names as a detail have never been displaced; but the peoples on the peripheries are always being displaced. That is why they insist upon their continuity - their links with their dead and the unborn.

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.

Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.

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

The camera relieves us of the burden of memory.

To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognised for oneself.

It is comparatively easy to achieve a certain unity in a picture by allowing one colour to dominate, or by muting all the colours. Matisse did neither. He clashed his colours together like cymbals and the effect was like a lullaby.