Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.

Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

Every city has a sex and age which have nothing to do with demography.

If the public photograph contributes to a memory, it is to the memory of an unknowable and total stranger.

Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying the pursuit of a single dogma.

Autobiography begins with a sense of being alone. It is an orphan form.

What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.