He had been always escaping, always rebelling, always fighting against authority, and always being flogged. There had been a whole lifetime of torment such as this; forty-two years of it; and there he stood, speaking softly, arguing his case well, and pleading while the tears ran down his face for some kindness, for some mercy in his old age. ‘I have tried to escape; always to escape,’ he said, ’as a bird does out of a cage. Is that unnatural; is that a great crime?

Kahn once said, “The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future. This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single rather than multiple meanings. It’s what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.

The failure of language – the tyranny of moral generalization over social inspection – fed the ruling class’s belief that it was endangered from below.

Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer’s and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol’s mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.

Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public.

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne’s old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.

Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.

Now that rates are moving up, we’re seeing more aggressive offerings from banks.

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It’s like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don’t have any control over the action going on upstairs.