"You don’t paint souls, you paint bodies, and the soul shines through."

"There is a strong tradition in the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth of artists seeing marriage as the enemy of art. Love, yes; marriage, no. Flaubert took the wedding of any literary friend as a personal betrayal, and beyond that, a betrayal of their shared art."

"Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for."

"Anyone who understood art knew that it never achieved what its maker dreamed for it. Art always fell short, and the artist, far from rescuing something from the disaster of life, was thereby condemned to be a double failure."

"Чиме се можемо супротставити шуму времена? Једино оном музиком која је у нама самима - музиком нашег бића - коју неки успевају да претворе у стварну музику. Која се, током деценија, уколико је снажна и искрена и довољно чиста да угуши шум времена, претвара у шапат историје."

"Уметност припада сваком и ником. Уметност припада сваком времену и не припада ниједном. Уметност припада онима који је стварају и онима који је доживљавају. Уметност је шапат историје, који надјачава шум времена. Уметност не постоји ради уметности: она постоји за добро људи."

"Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love."

"In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art."