The point of a library's existence is not persuasion or evangelism, but knowledge. It is irrelevant to the good library whether, as an institution, it shares or promotes your core values or mine, or the Attorney General's or Saddam Hussein's. The library is always an instrument of choice, and the choice is always yours, not your elected or designated leaders.

It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.

It was van Gogh's madness that prevented him from working; the paintings themselves are ineffably sane, if sanity is to be defined in terms of exact judgment of ends and means and the power of visual analysis.

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.