I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality.

Aesthetics is for the artist like ornithology is for the birds.

The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.

Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to see a painting.

Growing up in Florida, it rained a lot, so we spent a lot of time indoors. I used to love Frogger. I got a lot of use out of that and Ms. Pac-man on my little Atari.

I had lots of trouble in school as a child, and I lost confidence. Teachers thought I was stupid. I learned to read very late, when I was 11. Dyslexia wasn't recognized then, and the assumption was you were incapable of thinking.

I think everything you do, whether it's low budget things when you're first starting out or full feature films or when you're working with Hollywood, you're always learning, all the time.

Life is a great university for the unfolding of the mind, for developing character. In choosing our life work, when we are free to choose, we should remember this, and choose that which will call the biggest man or woman out of us and not that from which we can coin the most dollars.

Technology is neutral and sterile. Now, technology is the nature of modern man; it is our environment and our horizon. Of course, every work of man is a negation of nature, but at the same time, it is a bridge between nature and us. Technology changes nature in a more radical and decisive manner: it throws it out.

Only in death will I relinquish my belts.

The higher one climbs the lonelier one is.

To pass through the door that leads to God's kingdom, we must go down on our knees.

I didn't realize that winning the Olympics at age 14 automatically put me in the category of being a celebrity.

The divine moment is holy.

Despite what you might guess, when monitoring your breathing, your body doesn't care whether you're inhaling enough oxygen. It cares only whether you're expelling enough carbon dioxide - that's the gas that sets off the panic button when you're suffocating.

I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot. You will think you have failed—but that won’t be true unless you give up.

My style is Edie Sedgwick meets Grace Jones, or Audrey Hepburn meets Salt 'n' Pepa. Strong and feisty but still classic.

Do you wish people to think well of you? Don’t speak well of yourself.

A home is a place where a pot of fresh soup simmers gently on the hob, filling the kitchen with soft aromas and filling your heart, and later your tummy, with joy.

Marriage is survived just on the basis of ordinary etiquette, day in and day out. Also cooking together helps a lot... I've seen all these marriages that failed. Those people are always hollering at each other. That doesn't work.

What really matters is that 'Black Swan' deploys and exaggerates all the cliches of earlier ballet movies, especially 'The Red Shoes,' another tale of a ballerina driven mad and suicidal.

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.

Being taken for granted is an unpleasant but sincere form of praise. Ironically, the more reliable you are, and the less you complain, the more likely you are to be taken for granted.

The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

It seems to be one of the paradoxes of creativity that in order to think originally we must familiarize ourselves with the ideas of others.

Every song I put on a record could be a single and I just pack my bags for it... and the minute it takes off, I'm not gonna be home for a while.

Usually, we find it difficult to control our mind. It seems as if our mind is like a balloon in the wind - blown here and there by external circumstances.