We have to have the money to do the work we want to do, as well as to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table. Fat commissions are good, but not always easy to come by, and each new painting takes its time. So we need to find every way possible to earn extra income from our work.

The trouble with lies was that once started, the fiction had to be continued, and it was hard always to be remembering details that you had made up upon the spur of the moment.

Anyone may have diamonds: an heirloom is an ornament of quite a different kind.

It is a sadness of growing older that some of us lose our ardent appreciation of what is new and different and difficult.

You would not think that birds who have no brain at all could become so friendly. I swear some of them are more intelligent than many humans, but that says more about our fellow beings than it does about the birds.

How close the sexes sometimes come to one another. It is as much a matter of behaviour and the spere in which they move that separates the masculine part of humanity from the feminine.

One remembers horrors, I think, for the rest of one's life, but memories do not always remain so sharp, and with time, and new circumstance, do not affect us so powerfully.