"I had devoted too much of my life to this utterly irrational game. I would chuck the whole thing and take to Strindberg for amusement."

"I was putting together a picture of a life that would have depressed anyone with the sensitivity of a rhino. Back when I had first seen her, when her features were alive, she had looked sensitive. Or …"

"The zealous care with which J. M. W. Turner endeavoured to do his duty, is proved by a large existing series of drawings, exquisitely tinted, and often completely coloured, all by his own hand, of the…"

"The preoccupation of the novelist: how to capture the living moments, was answered by the diary. You write while you are alive. You do not preserve them in alcohol until the moment you are ready to wr…"

"The deepest wounds aren't the ones we get from other people hurting us. They are the wounds we give ourselves when we hurt other people."