12 Quotes by Jenny Diski

There’s a cultural conviction that any ‘artist’ must have personal suffering to back up their work, otherwise there’s something undeserved and therefore inauthentic about it, perhaps even some sort of cheating.

But given that depression happened to me, and I did have support, I found it was possible after a time, to achieve a kind of joy totally disconnected from the world. I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is coloured white and filled with a singing silence. It is an endless ice-rink. It is Antarctica.

She wished Martin hadn’t taken his Encyclopaedia Britannica with him when they split up. She missed that more than she missed him.