Маунтолив

...the Egyptian night fell — the sudden reducion of all objecs to bas-reliefs upon a screen of gold and violet.

Презрение к смерти переродилось в презрение к жизни, и жизнь подобный человек согласен принимать исключительно на своих условиях.

Хотя я, конечно же, не хотела бы встречи с художником, которым восхищаюсь. Сдается мне, личность и творчество — вещи куда как далекие друг от друга.

...Зарегистрировать идею в голове у мусульманина — все равно что выкрасить стену: нужно дождаться, когда первый слой подсохнет, прежде чем накладывать второй.

To escape — always to escape…. The desire of a writer to be alone with himself — ‘the writer, most solitary of human animals’;...

‘My God, am I slowly becoming
irresistible to myself?’

For the artist, I think, as for the public, no such thing as art exists; it only exists for the critics and those who live in the forebrain. Artist and public simply register, like a seismograph, an electromagnetic charge which can’t be rationalized. One only knows that a transmission of sorts goes on, true or false, successful or unsuccessful, according to chance.

Are we still beset by the doleful dream of the Arabian Nights, fathered on us by three generations of sexually disoriented Victorians whose subconscious reacted wholeheartedly to the thought of more than one legal wife?

I just don’t see what D. H. Lawrence has to offer a pasha with seventeen wives, though I believe I know which one of them is happiest….

But he was not altogether a fool; he was learning the two most important lessons in life: to make love honestly and to reflect.