Nakedness reveals itself. Nudity is placed on display. The nude is condemned to never being naked. Nudity is a form of dress.
One can say of language that it is potentially the only human home, the only dwelling place that cannot be hostile to man.
The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of. We can do with the past exactly what we wish. What we can’t do is to change its consequences.
We who draw do so not only to make something observed visible to others, but also to accompany something invisible to its incalculable destination.
The autobiographical doesn’t interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
A drawing is an autobiographical record of one’s discovery of an event – either seen, remembered or imagined. A ‘finished’ work is an attempt to construct an event in itself.
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls.
What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.
It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it.
Publicity is the life of this culture – in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive – and at the same time publicity is its dream.
Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it. No painting or drawing, however naturalist, belongs to its subject in the way that a photograph does.
When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and four walls. What is to happen next will take place within the four walls of the story. And this is possible because the story’s voice makes everything its own.
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with an older woman.
What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind.
What any true painting touches is an absence – an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.
If every event which occurred could be given a name, there would be no need for stories.
Your lips, beloved, are like a honeycomb: honey and milk are under the tongue. And the smell of your clothes is like the smell of my home.
History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past.
A drawing is essentially a private work, related only to the artist’s own needs; a ‘finished’ statue or canvas is essentially a public, presented work – related far more directly to the demands of communication.