Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!

The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.

The national characteristics... the restless metaphysical curiosity, the tenderness of good living and the passionate individualism. This is the invisible constant in a place with which the ordinary tourist can get in touch just by sitting quite quietly over a glass of wine in a Paris bistro.

I am quite alone. I am neither happy nor unhappy; I lie suspended like a hair or a feather in the cloudy mixtures of memory.

Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.

Frost in January minus 20 for a week. Dead birds frozen on the branch—they fall with the first thaw like ripe fruit—death-ripened. We shall all end like them—just a stain in the snow.

Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.