The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Ultimately ideas come out of a temperament or a sensibility, they are a crystallization or a precipitation of temperament.

Death is unbearable unless you can get beyond the I.

A good book is an education of the heart.

Our appreciations, it was felt, could be so much more inclusive if we said that something, instead of being beautiful, was 'interesting'.

This is the beauty that emerges from self-confidence, class confidence. That says, I am not born to please. I am born to be pleased.

A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.