I work three months really hard, nonstop, and then I take a month off. Then I do it all over again. I work hard but I give myself four breaks a year. ↗
To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture. ↗
Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs. ↗
I had absolutely no trauma in my childhood. If anyone ever assumed that my books were autobiographical, they'd be sorely disappointed, because none of these things happened to me. ↗
After the war, prompted by the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, I entered Parliament so that a priest could speak out for the poor, as canon law at that time still permitted. ↗
There's a tradition in British intellectual life of mocking any non-political force that gets involved in politics, especially within the sphere of the arts and the theatre. ↗