To write poetry and to commit suicide, apparently so contradictory, had really been the same, attempts at escape.

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

No amount of reading and intelligent deduction could supplant the direct experience.

Each age, each guilty age, builds high walls around its Versailles; and personally I hate those walls most when they are made by literature and art.

That's the trouble with provincial life. Everyone knows everyone and there is no mystery. No romance.

Edith Sitwell's interest in art was largely confined to portraits of herself.

Thomas Beecham was a pompous little band-master who stood against everything creative in the art of his time.