Gloria Yu

“You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and you called the painting “Vanity,” thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you had depicted for you own pleasure.”
― John Berger, Ways of Seeing

“It was culture as class performance, literature fetishised for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys, so that they might afterwards feel superior to the uneducated people whose emotional journeys they liked to read about.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“I preferred an artist who transformed his time, not mirrored it." - reference to Andy Warhol”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility!”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest