Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.

A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.

And I sort of frowned about that, thinking. 'You felt ill this afternoon,' he said, 'because you're getting better. When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the hateful with fear and nausea. You're becoming healthy, that's all.

Every grain of experience is food for the greedy growing soul of the artist.

I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist.

Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

Life is, of course, terrible.