I'm always trying to reach a transcendent point a romantic point but reach it in a really unconventional way a really profane way. To get to that romantic touching heartbreaking place but through a lot of acts of profanity.

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature. art and religion.

Religion is a search for transcendence. But transcendence isn't necessarily sited in an external god which can be a very unspiritual unreligious concept.

Too many younger artists critics and curators are fetishizing the sixties transforming the period into a deformed cult a fantasy religion a hip brand and a crippling disease.

Of all the important relationships that Australia has with other countries none has been more greatly transformed over the last 10 years than our relationship with China.

It's as if I were collaborating with myself revealing my relationship to the material. My hand would make the drawing. Then my mouth would transmit it.

In the beginning New York and I had kind of a love-hate relationship. It seemed so abrasive compared to Europe. But the transformation here in recent years is really something. I don't think I would have seen as much change if I'd lived in any other city in the world.

There must of course be a relationship between translating and making poems of your own but what it is I just don't know.

Yes I don't believe that the inter-Korean relationship has quote 'deteriorated' since I assumed office. Rather I believe that the relationship between the two Koreas is entering into a new phase - a time of transition. And so I think that the North Koreans are trying to see what they can build with this with my new administration.

The transatlantic relationship is vital for both our countries: France will remain a reliable ally of the United States. Nevertheless ally does not mean aligned.

I've become invested with this symbolic power. It really does transcend what I'm actually doing and what I actually deserve.

A reform is a correction of abuses a revolution is a transfer of power.

Well when I was younger I lied all the time because once you understand the power of lying it's really like magic because you transform reality for people.

I believe in the transformational power of liberty. I believe that the free Iraq is in this nation's interests. I believe a free Afghanistan is in this nation's interest.

King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities a reevaluation of our values a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

By giving people the power to share we're making the world more transparent.

I didn't become leader to transform the Liberal Democrats into an enlarged form of the Electoral Reform Society. It's not the be all and end all for us. There are other very very key ambitions in politics not least social mobility and life chances that I care about as passionately if not more.

The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising by computer games and Internet visuals by film and MTV by the fashion shoot.

When I hit a block regardless of what I am writing what the subject matter is or what's going on in the plot I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why but it calms me calms my brain.

When you're looking that far out you're giving people their place in the universe it touches people. Science is often visual so it doesn't need translation. It's like poetry it touches you.

The musician - if he be a good one - finds his own perception prompted by the poet's perception and he translates the expression of that perception from the terms of poetry into the terms of music.

I was always interested in French poetry sort of as a sideline to my own work I was translating contemporary French poets. That kind of spilled out into translation as a way to earn money pay for food and put bread on the table.

I guess I wanted to leave America for awhile. It wasn't that I wanted to become an expatriate or just never come back I needed some breathing room. I'd already been translating French poetry I'd been to Paris once before and liked it very much and so I just went.