A creative life cannot be sustained by approval, any more than it can be destroyed by criticism.

What the British seem to like are television historians and naturalists, not public intellectuals. You can't help feeling that's because one supplies narrative and the other supplies facts, and the British are traditionally empiricists so they/we have a resistance to theory and to theoreticians playing too prominent a role in public life.

Once the working classes were in chains, now they're in chain restaurants.

I am a regular if not exactly enthusiastic patron of my local bookshop. I try to buy at least some books there because I cling to the belief that it's important to maintain those businesses which put a human face on the exchange of money for goods and services.

I'm going to end up like one of those old weirdos who lives in a network of tunnels burrowed through trash - yet I do not fear this.

Schadenfreude is so nutritious.

As far as I can see, the history of experimental art in the twentieth century is intimately bound up with the experience of intoxification.