Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.

Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway.

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.

Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.

It eases my soul that I share a house with [Cassandra King] a novelist of such rare and distinctive gifts.

Keep moving. Have a goal, One day you will arrive at a place that is better than the place where you were, even if it is only in your head.

If you were buying products or going to movies based upon the politics of the people involved, well I probably couldn't go to half the movies I go to.

No one's gonna sympathize when we crash, they'll say you hit what you head for, you get what you ask.

Kindness can change the lives of people.

Perhaps I should be flattered that somebody imagines the name is worth so much, especially since my parents gave me the same name 42 years ago for free.

It only takes a second to score a goal.

If one person dreams alone... It is only a dream. When many people dream together... It is the beginning of a new reality.

And I love writing. I've always loved writing.

I wrote my earliest piece for The Sunday Times about being a young wife.