This is what's so terrifying about being lonely: the instinctive sense that it is literally repulsive, inhibiting contact at just the moment contact is most required.

[of Nan Goldin] In an afterword to Ballad written in 2012, she declared: ‘I decided as a young girl I was going to leave a record of my life and experience that no one could rewrite or deny.

Collapse, spread, merging, union: these things sound like the opposite of loneliness, and yet intimacy requires a solid sense of self to be successful and satisfying.

There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure.

Why do you put yourself in unsafe places? Because something in you feels fundamentally devoid of worth.

What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast.

When the inner Spirit has Liberation, Inspiration is born!

Judge no one but love every one.

Study yourself

Ubi boni, malum prosperat (Where good men are silent, evil prospers)

I go and see anything that's visually new, any technology that's about picture-making. The technology won't make the pictures different, but someone using it will.

Writing poetry makes you intensely conscious of how words sound, both aloud and inside the head of the reader. You learn the weight of words and how they sound to the ear.

V-J Day, or Victory in Japan Day, marks the date of the Japanese surrender that ended fighting in the Pacific.

As a teacher I approach my students purely with the human desire to free them from all scholarly inhibitions, and I tell them, "Painters must speak through paint not through words."

Every time I open a new restaurant, I wake up in the middle of the night moaning about bread and water. I dream I am in the middle of the dining room, and I am panicked.

The streets and alleys of the ward were notoriously filthy, and the contractors habitually neglected them, not failing, however, to draw their regular payments from the city treasury.