“Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings…. We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.”

(A Way in the World, V.S. Naipaul)

(Name of grandfather)

“A battle is like lust, the frenzy passes, consequence remains.”

(The Carthagian general, Hannibel)

“An artist is a person who has invented an artist.”

(F. Bacon)

“People do not die immediately for us, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of life…It is as though they were traveling abroad.”

(M. Proust)

“When I see a woman in the distance dressed [for work], I see a [woman]. But when she is nude in front of me, I see a goddess.”

(A. Giacometti)

“The dangers of life are infinite and safety is among them.”

(Goethe)

“Love and artistic aspiration are incompatible.”

(F. Bacon)

“Life is so meaningless we might as well try to make ourselves extraordinary.”

(F. Bacon)

“It’s only by going too far that you can hope to break the mould and do something new. Art is a question of going too far.”

(F. Bacon)

“To all appearances, the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.”

(M. Duchamp)

“My final wish would be to go like Renoir, who on the last day of his life, painted his final picture, put down his brushes, signed and said: “I think I’m beginning to learn something now.”

(J. Olsen)

“If you look for light you can find it.”

(L. Rees)

“He loves to listen to the sound of a brush or pen as it travels across the surface. He loves the challenge of “trying to make the paint on the canvas sing – give it a kind of energy, a magic language.”

(J. Olsen)

“The journey is it , and the aim of the journey is not to arrive. The aim is to put poetry into the journey.”

(J. Olsen)

“It’s a struggle to achieve true freedom, because it is not about ego or arrogantly doing your own thing. It is about character, observing what is important about yourself, taking risks, discovering secrets, acting courageously but responsibly. True freedom is a complete liberation of the spirit because you owe nothing to anyone, you’ve paid all your dues through your integrity.”

(J. Olsen)

“All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone.”

(M. Duchamp)

“We experience our transitoriness and mortality as an act of violence perpetrated against us.”

(C. Milosz)

“Talk about painting: there’s no point. By conveying a thing through the medium of language you change it. You construct qualities that can be said, and you leave out the ones that can’t be said but are always the most important.”

(G. Richter)

“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

(S. LeWitt)

“Whoever considers these four things:/Who is above us?/What is below us?/What was there before the world?/What will there be after it?/Better for him that he had never been born.”

(Babylonian Talmud, Haguigah IIb)

“you planted them for someone/else but picked them for me,/it’s like you changed what you were saying/in mid-sentence…../was I an afterthought or/a new conversation?”

(H. Breiter)