“You are safe with me.""I am not at all safe, with you. But I have no desire to be elsewhere.”

“History, writing, infect after a time a man's sense of himself...”

“Good writing is always new.”

“Vocabularies are crossing circles and loops. We are defined by the lines we choose to cross or to be confined by.”

“The children mingled with the adults, and spoke and were spoken to. Children in these families, at the end of the nineteenth century, were different from children before or after. They were neither...”

“Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mime...”

“To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.”

“art is risk made visible”

“Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”