The Muse

Like most artists, everything I produced was connected to who I was - and so I suffered according to how my work was received. The idea that anyone might be able to detach their personal value from their public output was revolutionary.

Do you have a body if there is no one there to touch it? I suppose you do, but sometimes it felt like I didn't. I was just a mind floating around the rooms.

Why are we so trapped by the hours, the minutes of every day? Why can't we live the life that's always out of reach?

You really are an artist, aren’t you? You think it’s all about you, and you never stop looking for pain.

...Is there ever such a thing as a whole story, or an artist's triumph, a right way to look through the glass? It all depends on where the light falls.

Not all of us receive the ends that we deserve. Many moments that change a life's course - a conversation with a stranger on a ship, for example - are pure luck. And yet no one writes you a letter, or chooses you as their confessor, without good reason. This is what she taught me: you have to be ready in order to be lucky. You have to put your pieces into play.

She had never had a friend like this, in her private room, combing her hair, listening to her, talking about silly nonsense and the uselessness of one's parents; how the future was perfect, because they hadn't lived it yet.

We studied men like him at school – protected gentlemen, rich gentlemen, white gentlemen, who picked up pens and wrote the world for the rest of us to read.

You can do more with rumour than you can with fact

I would have preferred not to have to choose between writing and loving; because for me, they were often the same thing. It was a time of new experiences, without the benefit of the old to mitigate the after-effects.

Then the birds flew away, their names turned to kisses, a silence to spell a new world.

She had told me that the approval of other people should never be my goal

I’m doing the absolute opposite of giving myself away. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll be completely visible. If the painting sells, I’ll be in Paris, hanging on a wall. If anything, I’m being selfish. It’s perfect; all the freedom of creation, with none of the fuss.

pity was the path to indifference.

A summer’s day will make so many sounds, when you yourself remain completely silent.

In many instances, politics was the cover for personal vendetta and family feud. Most of the right-wing terror was directed against those who had influenced the violence against the priests and the factory owners back in 1934 - union leaders, prominent anti-clericals, several Republican mayors. And yet - mechanics, butchers, doctors, builders, labourers, barbers - they too were 'taken for a walk', as the phrase came to be known. And it wasn't just men. Certain women who had become teachers under the Republic were removed, as were known anarchists' wives. None of it was legal, of course, but there seemed no means of stopping it, when hate and power were in play.

I’m not a genius. I just work hard.

Although any collective answer to my question remains to be seen, personally I feel quite certain of it. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: in the end, a piece of art only succeeds when its creator – to paraphrase Olive Schloss – possesses the belief that brings it into being. Odelle

her thoughtless determination, her acceptance that was so whole-hearted,

Above her, the sky was soaked with stars." (p.210)

If you really want to see your work to completion, you have to desire it more than you'd believe. You have to fight it, fight yourself. It's not easy.

I didn't know it, but a bond had been sealed, and who'd suggested what, who'd wanted what--the strange dance of allusions and manners that distinguishes the first time for anything--had faded. We were dependent on each other without really knowing each other, in that way the young can be when they have never been burned or hurt or discarded, when they share everything, making the mistake that the other person is the answer to their confusing sum. He was lonely and I was lost--or was it the other way round? We hadn't slept together; it hadn't got to that yet. It was very innocent, in its way.

People like Lawrie - who never wrote a single line of prose, as far as I knew -seemed to want those who did to walk around with a pad and pencil hanging round their neck, jotting down the whole thing, turning it into a book for their own pleasure.

And it would take all my energy 'changing things' as you put it, with none left over to paint -- which is the whole bloody point of everything. The energy a man might use on -- oh, I don't know, making good work -- you want me to use on 'changing things'. You don't understand, because you've lived your life as an individual, Isaac. And yet everything you do as a man is universal. So enjoy the glory, enjoy the money, and do it for me, because I certainly wouldn't have been allowed.

Spain's past is a cut of meat turning green on the butcher's slab. When the war ended, people were forbidden to look back and see the circling flies. Soon they found themselves unable to turn their heads, discovering that there was no language permitted for their pain. But the paintings at least, remain: Gernica, the works of Dali and Miro ...

My writing became the axis upon which all my identity and happiness hinged. It was now outward-looking, a self-conscious performance. I was asked to repeat the pleasure for people, again and again, until the facsimile of my act became the act itself. Cynth’s

You’re not walking around with a golden halo beaming out of you depending on the power of your paragraph. You don’t come into it, once someone else is reading. It stands apart from you. Don’t let your ability drag you down, don’t hang it round your neck like an albatross.

My life was a beanstalk and I was Jack, and the foliage was shooting up and up, abundant, impressive, at such speed that I could barely cling on.

I thought I deserved them, the sort of people you found only in novels. Quick