"Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral: a thing as simple and specious as a statue to the first glance, and yet on examination, as lively and interesting as a forest in detail."

“I grew up in a socialist country. And I have seen what that does to people. There is no hope, no freedom. No pride in achievement.”

Source : "If You Had Actually Grown Up In A Soviet Country, This Is What You Would Have Experienced" by Rob Wile, www.businessinsider.com. October 22, 2012.

“Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.”

“Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”

“Photographers learn to interpret photographs in that technical way because they want to understand and use that 'language' themselves just as musicians learn a more technical musical language than the layman needs. Social scientists who want to work with visual materials will have to learn to approach them in this more studious and time-consuming way.”

Source : "Visual Research Methods". Book by Peter Hamilton, 2006.

“Every young artist has to do it one way, his [or her] way, and the hell with patterns. Remember who you are and where you are and what you are doing.... And never take advice, including this.”

“It is necessary, in this world, to be made of harder stuff than one's environment.”

“All of us knew that climbing was a sure way to stay poor, a lousy way to impress people and definitely no way to meet girls.”

“I was a hostess, I sold shoes, but I don't function well in jobs that don't have to do with what I love. I have cleaned bathrooms in theaters, I have sold wine in theaters, I have sold tickets, because I will do anything, anything, to stay in this world.”