I Am A Creature Of My Pen.

Narrative Is One Of The Best Intoxicants Or Tranquilisers.

In My Mind's Eye Shakespeare Is A Huge, Hot Sea-beast, With Fire In His Veins And Ice On His Claws And Inscrutable Eyes, Who Looks Like An Inchoate Hump Under The Encrustations Of Live Barnacle-commentaries, Limpets And Trailing Weeds.

The More Research You Do, The More At Ease You Are In The World You're Writing About. It Doesn't Encumber You, It Makes You Free.

There Are Many Ways Of Writing Badly About Painting... There Is An 'appreciative' Language Of Threadbare, Not Inaccurate, But Overexposed And Irritating Words... The Language Of The Schools Which 'situates' Works And Artists In Schools And Movements... Novelists And Poets [that] See Paintings As Allegories Of Writing.

...it Is Not Possible To Create The Opposite Of What One Has Always Known, Simply Because The Opposite Is Believed To Be Desired. Human Beings Need What They Already Know, Even Horrors.