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The sense of one's past is so strong and forms our sense of self so strongly, it will always fascinate, elude and confuse me.

The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend you remember.

The past is a ghost, the future a dream, and all we ever have is now.

I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, 'You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been'. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.

The past is not simply the past, but a prism through which the subject filters his own changing self-image.

The belief may be too often mistaken, but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive, and can result in an interpretation that carries conviction. Sometimes confidence is all that's needed.

The illusion is that most of my work is simply about past events: a point in history and nothing else.

Obviously the facts are never just coming at you but are incorporated by an imagination that is formed by your previous experience. Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.