The imagination is not an escape, but a return to the richness of our true selves; a return to reality.

In Scotland, when people congregate, they tend to argue and discuss and reason; in Orkney, they tell stories.

Without the story - in which everyone living, unborn and dead, participates - men are no more than bits of paper blown on the cold wind.

As soon as the seal was clear of the water, it reared up and its skin slipped down to the sand. What had been a seal was a white-skinned boy

Hills tell old stories. Cliffs are poets with harps.

Old wisdom out of the cluster of gathering shadows.

We never find what we set out hearts on. We ought to be glad of that.

The Orkney imagination is haunted by time.

Jazz is the assassination, the murdering, the slaying of syncopation. I would even go so far as to confess that we are musical anarchists.

Instead of chasing the idea of truth, what we should be doing is embracing the medium of drawing and using it for a purpose that fulfils our needs as an artist or designer.

It would be a better world if everyone in it knew all the truth about everything.

It isn't making mistakes that's critical; it's correcting them and getting on with the principal task.

The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.

I would argue that security and liberty, security and privacy are not actually opposing. The only place those can be oppositional is in the realm of rhetoric but not fact.

I always wished that I could find someone as beautiful as you, but in the process I forgot that I was special too.

You know, you can only lead them from behind.

I never Google myself. Only if I want to feel really terrible about myself would I do that.

It was like a dream to me to suddenly get into the market with that kind of movie, like La Haine. It actually created my identity as an actor, that thing.