Funny way to spend your life, though, studying another chap's versifying.

Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost.

Pain hardens, and great pain hardens greatly, whatever the comforters say, and suffering does not ennoble, though it may occasionally lend a certain rigid dignity of manner to the suffering frame.

That is human nature, that people come after you, willingly enough, provided only that you no longer love or want them.

When I was a child - in wartime, pre-television - books were my life.

There are many ways of writing badly about painting... There is an 'appreciative' language of threadbare, not inaccurate, but overexposed and irritating words... the language of the schools which 'situates' works and artists in schools and movements... novelists and poets [that] see paintings as allegories of writing.

I like feeling my way into different minds and experiences. It comes naturally and always has.