My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep...
The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.
Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our i...
Mia madre non voleva che i libri cadessero nelle mie mani. Non aveva previsto che io potessi cadere nei libri, che mi infilassi dentro di loro per stare al sicuro.
Art is enchantment and artists have the right of spells. ... The success of later Shakespeare is the success of spells, where every element, however uneven, however incredible, is fastened to the next...
Nowadays people talk about the things he did as though they made sense. As though even his most disastrous mistakes were only the result of bad luck or hubris.
When you are born--what you are born into, the place, the history of the place, how that history mates with your own-- stamps who you are, whatever the pundits of globalisation have to say.
Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.
Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe anyone loves y...
The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story - of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story a...
The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over...
Reading's not a luxury, art's not a luxury. It's about your soul, and it's about yourself. And if reading is a luxury, being human is a luxury
Book collecting is an obsession, an occupation, a disease, an addiction, a fascination, an absurdity, a fate. It is not a hobby. Those who do it must do it. Those who do not do it, think of it as a co...
For fate may hang on any moment and at any moment be changed.
When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love -- its quality -- to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning th...
The free man never thinks of escape.
When you follow a star you know you will never reach that star; rather it will guide you to where you want to go. ... So it is with the world. It will only ever lead you back to yourself.
This Captain had been brought up in Istanbul. His mind was made of minarets and domes. He capped himself with spacious ease. He was his own call to prayer.
In the economy of the body, the limbic highway takes precedence over the neural pathways. We were designed and built to feel, and there is no thought, no state of mind, that is not also a feeling stat...
If there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes.