Don't talk. I can't hear myself see.

I think that writing is a process that tells you what you think. You sometimes actually don't know what your opinion is until you hear yourself trying to piece it out and have it make sense to you. The process itself is so bizarre and mysterious that you never know what it's going to tell you.

Anybody who writes knows the horrible, wonderful, beautiful foulness that comes every week. A lot of moaning, screaming agony - "Oh my god, the deadline's coming."

Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery, works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.

I don't often go to curator or artist walk-throughs of exhibitions. For a critic, it feels like cheating. I want to see shows with my own eyes, making my own mistakes, viewing exhibitions the way most of their audience sees them.