“He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary.”

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable.

I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

In art economy is always beauty.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Excellence does not require perfection.

There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.

A tradition is kept alive only by something being added to it.

Innocent and infinite are the pleasures of observation.

Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.

Since my kitchen is the most important part of my home, I want to be creative and innovative, not only in its aesthetic, but also in the tools that I’m using to cook.

The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees.

I was once described by one of my critics as an aesthetic fascist.

Actors aren’t stupid, mostly, and if there’s a sensibility and an aesthetic that a director’s going for, if you’re aware of that too, you can do things to help that.

A man obsessed: obsessed with perfection, sharing, aesthetics, taste, savoir-faire, and much more.