…) hrůza se ze všech emocí, co jich na světě je, nejvíc vzpírá tomu, aby si ji člověk dokázal udržet déle než okamžik.
Things that came naturally to females did not impress my mother, not at all. In her view you might as well be proud of breathing or walking or giving birth. Our
Many learned things can be said about the Venus of Urbino but if you don’t open your eyes and recognize her first and foremost as an erotic object how can you claim that you’ve seen her at all?
Certainly don’t write as a public service. But I am aware, at least as a reader, that remarkable acts of art-making—bold, perverse, unbeholden, free—have had the side effect of changing the weather in...
Because white novelists are not white novelists but simply novelists, and white characters are not white characters but simply human, and criticism of both is not partial or personal but a matter of a...
You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
You could drown in memories like these, but she tried to swim free of them. She jumped over the small wall that fringed the Iqbal house, as she had a million times over, and rang the doorbell. Past te...
You can feel bad... I mean, that's not illegal.
Yet when I waved at those two girls I noticed I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that they were timeless symbols of girlhood, or of childish friendship.
While she was becoming, everyone grew up and became.
When your personal multiplicity is printed on your face, in an almost too obviously thematic manner, in your DNA, in your hair and in the neither-this-nor-that beige of your skin - well, anyone can se...
When you are guilty, all you can ask for is a deferral of the judgement. ‘Whatever,
What? asked Natalie Blake. She really was too drunk to return to chambers. Her friend Layla was smiling, a little sadly. She was looking at the tablecloth. Nothing. You're exactly the same. Natalie wa...
We knew that they, in their own time, had feared school, just as we did now, feared the arbitrary rules and felt shamed by them, by the new uniforms they couldn’t afford, the baffling obsession with q...
USURY: Everybody's looking for the job in which you never have to pay anyone their pound of flesh. Self-employed nirvana. A lot of artists like to think of themselves as uncompromising; a lot of manag...
To her credit, though, Trace didn't lose her famous temper, not at that moment. At eighteen she was already expert at the older woman's art of fermenting rage, conserving it, for later use.
They were real people who entertained and argued and existed entirely independently from him, although he had set the thing in motion. They had different thoughts and beliefs. ~ on children growing up...
These children spend so much time demanding the status of adulthood from you - even when it isn't in your power to bestow it - and then when the real shit hits the fan, when you need them to be adults...
The thing I feared was no longer my parents' authority over me but that they might haul out into the open their own intimate fears, their melancholy and regrets.
The stupidity/pleasure axis I apply to popular artists: how much pleasure they give versus how stupid one has to become to receive said pleasure.