“Old age is an insult. It's like being smacked.”
“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”
“I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.”
“No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.”
“A woman's best love letters are always written to the man she is betraying.”
“Everyone loathes his own country and countrymen if he is any sort of artist.”
“It's unthinkable not to love --you'd have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you'd have to be Philip Larkin.”
“It's only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdy that you can get tenderness.”
“There are only three things to be done with a woman. You can love her, suffer for her, or turn her into literature.”
“The appalling thing is the degree of charity women are capable of. You see it all the time... love lavished on absolute fools. Love's a charity ward, you know.”
“For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.”
“Music is only love looking for words.”
“Truth disappears with the telling of it.”
“The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.”
“Now stiff on a pillar with a phallic air nelson stylites in Trafalgar square reminds the British what once they were.”
“Journeys, like artists, are born and not made. A thousand differing circumstances contribute to them, few of them willed or determined by the will --whatever we may think.”