33 Quotes by Arthur Phillips

The truth is, anyone who puts so much of herself and her life into art as you do must naturally fear any failure in that art as a potential threat to your life. And so you protect your art more than you protect your health or the common forms of happiness the rest of us have. And you probably have this in common with every artist you admire.

So why did poor artists originally hang around in cafes?""I don't know. Inspiration from the atmosphere.""Ha! No, you've been tricked, too, just like the rest of us. Cafes didn't have inspirational atmosphere at first. That only came later, when you knew artists had been hanging around in them.

Maria, groaning for scraps, would drape his head on my feet as I ate, trying to camouflage himself as my napkin or the rug.

You deicde, and you make our night what you want. Brilliant and ours. Stupid and theirs.

Love is not sufficient. It never has been. Stories that claim otherwise are lies. There's always SOMETHING after happily ever after.

He fell in love with Manhattan's skyline, like a first-time brothel guest falling for a seasoned professional. He mused over her reflections in the black East River at dusk, dawn, or darkest night, and each haloed light-in a tower or strung along the jeweled and sprawling spider legs of the Brooklyn Bridge's spans-hinted at some meaning, which could be understood only when made audible by music and encoded in lyrics.

... the orange circle faded to a coiled spring of dully glowing grey.

There are few things more pleasing than the contemplation of order and useful arrangement.

But music is, at the very minimum, inflammatory, exclusionary, divisive, encouraging of snobbery and solipsism.