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Everything went downhill & as a culmination of all this–guard duty in a prison camp.What I saw there shocked me completely.For the first time,I understood what freedom is, &cruelty &violence.I saw freedom behind bars,cruelty as senseless as poetry,violence as common as dampness.But life continued.What is more,life’s usual proportions stayed the he same. The ratio of good and evil,grief &happiness,remained unchanged.

Ma belle amie, l'homme le plus adroit ne peut encore se tenir au niveau de la femme la plus vraie.

Life itself is an unfinished sentence, or a few haphazard brush-strokes. Nothing stays. Nothing is completed. The meaning of a painting is a voice crying out:"I saw it. Before it vanished, it was thus." An honest painting would never be finished; an honest novel would stop in the middle of a sentence.There is no shutting life up in a cage, turning the key with a full-stop, with a stroke of paint.

Ugliness has the extra power of making beauty seem unreal, a service beauty seems rarely able to return.

Upon this impermanence we set up our easels and paint our pictures. What goes on to the canvas is the ticking of our hearts, the pulse of our lives. Yet when we die, what will happen? Those manifestos of ours against the indifference of the world will lie, face down, among old books and ornaments in junk-shops, in attics.

It's just that people are like doors. They all lead you into empty rooms. You pass through and are left with yourself.

Duty is very simple and obvious. It is nearly always what you don't want to do.

When Camilla opened the door, birds burst up out of bushes, flurrying the leaves, plunged into the dense creeper over the walls.The garden was still, soaked with dew, veiled with a pearly light as if sponged with milk. A little tree of morello cherries seemed painted upon the sky, its fruit luminously red like cherries on a hat.

The one she painted last summer was the best she ever did. The one of the room with the lace curtains. A very tender light flowing through them.'

'Yes, that was what I call a picture. Perhaps we always want paintings to be like novels.'

Where does this barbed wire end?
Snails crawl across the clothes of the killed.
Yet we did not come into the world
only to die.
Since at dawn
it smells of lemon peel.

Under the lukewarm water of night I held
the hand of sleep and the sense of forgetting
the texture of the blanket and of the wall.
If you lift the sheet
you won’t find me.
Try to find me – don’t you understand?
I’m deeper in.

I think the great novelists understand love, and most aspects of human behaviour, better than, say, psychiatrists or scientists or philosophers or priests or lonely-hearts columnists.

The brain only informs us on a need-to-know basis. Think of the world of John le Carré. Think of ourself - our self - as an agent running in the field, being told only part of a much wider picture, just enough for us to behave plausibly and fulfil our functions. 'Control' is running us, but at the same time we 'are' our brains. Even le Carré can't compete with all the complications and subterfuges of this.

Nothing is worth the destruction of another human being. Somewhere the path of pain and betrayal must end.

Legmen for Haydon's Soviet networks, they'd been around for years, known simply as the Russians. They were blond and squat and they looked more like Russians than the real ones.

Guillam noticed the queer colour of Haydon’s cheeks. A blushing red, daubed high on the bones, but deep, made up of tiny broken veins. It gave him, thought Guillam in his heightened state of nervousness, a slightly Dorian Gray look.

Flaubert believed it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another & great paintings required no words of explanation.Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting.But we are very far from reaching that state.We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions.It is a rare picture which stuns,or argues, us into silence.

Out of date perhaps, but who wasn’t these days? Out of date, but loyal to his own time. At a certain moment, after all, every man chooses: will he go forward, will he go back? There was nothing dishonourable in not being blown about by every little modern wind.

The song composer Schubert excited the Viennese public with his ‘new sounds’, especially harmonies, with often unconventional,difficult accompaniments. The elite Schuppanzigh Quartet introduced Beethoven but also Schubert into its programs. Still,the public knew virtually nothing about Schubert’s chamber music–as little as of the symphonies, none of which was publicly performed or published in Schubert’s lifetime.

The easygoing flair for living practised by the Viennese manifested itself in Schubert’s days also in an easygoing attitude toward art. For in Vienna there developed a tendency aptly characterized with the phrase Musik and Menu, to treat music as merely music, not artistic manifestation so serious that one could not also loudly converse and eat heartily during a musical performance.

The preference of the Viennese public for the representation of more or less lavishly assembled bouquets of flowers, the disproportionally large number of flower painters, the mass of pictures – all these were directly connected with the existence of the Imperial-Royal Viennese Porcelain Factory. In 1812, the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts established a professorship in flower painting.

Vienna is windy and unhealthy’ goes the saying, for weak lungs cannot withstand the commonly-present dust of the gravel floor. Among the ten to eleven thousand people who die annually, a quarter of them die from lung diseases, the result of too much waltzing.”

(A visitor to Vienna during Schubert’s lifetime on the ballroom dust on the dance floor surfaces)

The events of 1870-71 impressed on everyone who experienced them a profound sense of precariousness. Many who lived through the Terrible Year succumbed to a new and suddenly deeper sense of existential fragility, and it is hard not to see Impressionism’s emphasis on fugitive light, shifting seasons, glimpsed street scenes, and transient domesticity as expressions of this heightened awareness of change and mortality.

Art is one of the ways we reveal the peculiarities of consciousness – for me it’s the clearest way. It’s through other people’s novels,other people’s paintings, other people’s poems & other people’s music that I am made aware that everybody is not like anyone else, and yet we are all stuck inside these flesh cages, experiencing what we imagine to be a shared reality through a radically singular medium: consciousness.

Whenever I consider the very many writers who have left their mark on my writing in one way or another, I am reminded that you do not need to be perfectly aligned with someone to be in their debt. See also: parents.
(introduction to obituaries written for Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Hillary Mantel)

It strikes me that the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. It is an attribute of mountains and objects, of the worthless toys in the children's bedroom at home that will outlive us all. That which is human decays and disappears: only in art does the quality of humanity favour survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant, that the next instant doesn't erase.

I am thinking about the future, though these thoughts are wordless and indistinct.. They are like running water, they pour towards an edge, a precipice,and tumble over the side. I don't want to go home Life could become flat again. It is desire that is big and grand and treacherous; desire, not life.

We turn to art to dignify our eexperience of the world;to find a reply to the question of consciousness.But I, too, have a qualm about the Fra Angelicos, the Peruginos.It is that they belong to the past.Their reality is so remote from our own:I fear to look at them is a form of nostalgia.I fear the feeling of sadness they cause me, sadness that our own world is not more beautiful.
(paradoxical thought, if you ask me)

In England,I became increasingly sure that to possess sth was to arrest knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession.But there is an element of death in knowledge.Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost.Its presence is painful,because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.

The spaghetti alle vongole is so delicious that it has a kind of holiness about it. Trained as we now are on sheep's milk cheese and white Italian flour, purged of our promiscuous tastes, we are capable of understanding it. It is our prize, our reward, this understanding. A pile of empty clam-shells remains on my plate like the integuments of a poem whose meaning I have finally teased out.