Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.

Hold a book in your hand and you're a pilgrim at the gates of a new city.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.

All grief, anyone's grief...is the weight of a sleeping child.

To survive was to escape fate. But if you escape your fate, whose life do you then step into?

It's not a person's depth you must discover, but their ascent. Find their path from depth to ascent.

Truth grows gradually in us, like a musician who plays a piece again and again until suddenly he hears it for the first time

Consistent happiness is an art - An art that involves taking and maintaining control of which thoughts you give attention to and which thoughts you disregard

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

When other little girls wanted to be ballet dancers, I kind of wanted to be a vampire.

There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.

Music is supposed to be interwoven into the fabric of society; it is not supposed to be a plaything that is there to serve the population's titillation of the moment.

I am supporting David Cameron purely out of cynical self-interest.

A well-wrapped statistic is better than Hitler's 'big lie'; it misleads, yet it cannot be pinned on you.

If I'm lucky, when I paint, first my patrons leave the room, then my dealers, and if I'm really lucky I leave too.

In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create.

As an artist, it is great to be able to market yourself to people who don't know you, and people who do.