“When the past is hard to explain, its best to concentrate on the future.”

“The easy joy and the joyful ease of sex with men, their easy-access genitalia, their uncomplicated inner lives”

“Peggy spent most of her time upstairs in the playroom, keeping him cleaned and fed. She was made to bring out the baby and accept praise for her work as if she were a being of a slightly lower soci...”

“He informed Byrdie that his social engineering ambitions betrayed all the delusions of grandeur that you might expect from the son of a poet.”

“The library, like the thrift shop, specialised in the leavings of the elderly dead.”

“Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire.”

“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.”