Moreover, the works already known are due to chance and experiment rather than to sciences; for the sciences we now possess are merely systems for the nice ordering and setting forth of things already invented; not methods of invention or directions for new works.

If I go to the National Gallery and I look at one of the great paintings that excite me there, it's not so much the painting that excites me as that the painting unlocks all kinds of valves of sensation within me which return me to life more violently.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

There is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals.

There is in human nature generally more of the fool than of the wise.

It's such an extraordinary supple medium that you never do quite know what paint will do.

...to invent is to discover that we know not, and not to recover or resummon that which we already know