Very little changed fundamentally, except that the proud German soldier had turned into a defeated bundle of misery and the great German army had disintegrated.

The cult of individuality and personality, which promotes painters and poets only to promote itself, is really a business. The greater the 'genius' of the personage, the greater the profit.

My drawings and paintings were done as an act of protest; I was trying by means of my work to convince the world that it is ugly, sick and hypocritical.

How did I come to be an artist ? Endless curiosity, observation, research - and a great amount of joy in the thing

I had grown up in a humanist atmosphere, and war to me was never anything but horror, mutilation and senseless destruction, and I knew that many great and wise people felt the same way about it.

It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing 'art' to defend their collapsing culture.

What can I say about the First World War, a war in which I served as an infantryman, a war I hated at the start and to which I never warmed as it proceeded?

The war was a mirror; it reflected man's every virtue and every vice, and if you looked closely, like an artist at his drawings, it showed up both with unusual clarity.

I thought the war would never end. And perhaps it never did, either.

The neutrality and clarity of an engineering drawing is a better model for teaching about art than all the uncontrollable drivel about the cabbala and metaphysics and the ecstasy of sainthood.

Peace was declared, but not all of us were drunk with joy or stricken blind.

The price of love is high- but pain- we sell it cheap.

Even if God had created us, He would never have admitted it.

Even gods decay. Like, in 1890 somebody sold off thousands of mummified Ancient Egyptian sacred cats - _for fertilizer_. Get the point? Constancy isn't.

Good service can save a bad meal, but there is no level of food that can save bad service.

That’s the funny thing about arriving somewhere, Vin,” he said with a wink. “Once you’re there, the only thing you can really do is leave again.

We must beware of falling into the fatally common error of supposing that what we see is all there is to see.

I've been on the cover of "Time" magazine just about - I think it was four times now. Four times now in the last few months, and a lot of it is because of this. They've never seen this happen before.

Suffering is the pain of constraints. An atom of pure delight, no matter how small, can hold it at bay.

There is no act, however trivial, but has its train of consequences.

Every man has a coward and hero in his soul.