[On amassing art for her collection:] My motto was 'Buy a picture a day' and I lived up to it.

I don't collect anymore. Everything is so terribly expensive. I don't see anything I like anyhow.

If anything can rival Venice in its beauty, it must be its reflection at sunset in the Grand Canal.

I thought it would be nice to marry Virgil [Thomson] to have a musical background, but I never got far with the project.

To go out in a gondola at night is to reconstruct in one's imagination the true Venice, the Venice of the past alive with romance, elopements, abductions, revenged passions, intrigues, adulteries, denouncements, unaccountable deaths, gambling, lute playing and singing.

My mother's one idea was to sacrifice her life to her children and she had done nothing else since the death of my father. We wished that she had married again instead.

Having plenty of time and all the museum's funds at my disposal, I put myself on a regime to buy one picture a day.