[On John Tunnard:] One day a marvelous man in a highly elaborate tweed coat walked into the gallery. He looked a little like Groucho Marx. He was as animated as a jazz-band leader, which he turned out to be. He showed us his gouaches, which were as musical as Kandinsky's, as delicate as Klee's, and as gay as Miró's.

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.

I took advice from none but the best. I listened, how I listened! That's how I finally became my own expert.

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.

Venice is not only a city of fantasy and freedom. It is also a city of joy and pleasure.

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

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