Quotes from book

The Collector

“I love making, I love doing. I love being to the full, I love everything which is not sitting and watching and copying and dead at heart.”

“I'm not really sorry. But I'm not absolutely unsorry.”

“I just think of things as beautiful or not. Can't you understand? I don't think of good or bad. Just of beautiful or ugly. I think a lot of nice things are ugly and a lot of nasty things are beautiful.”

“When you draw something it lives and when you photograph it it dies”

“But forgetting's not something you do, it happens to you. Only it didn't happen to me”

“I think we are just insects, we live a bit and then die and that’s the lot. There’s no mercy in things. There’s not even a Great Beyond. There’s nothing.”

“You use your life.”

“I hate the uneducated and the ignorant. I hate the pompous and the phoney. I hate the jealous and the resentful. I hate the crabbed and mean and the petty. I hate all ordinary dull little people who aren't ashamed of being dull and little.”

“Art's cruel. You can get away with murder with words. But a picture is like a window straight through to your inmost heart.”

“I mean I never feel I feel what I ought to feel.”

“They're beautiful. But sad.'
Everything's sad if you make it so, I said.”

“The power of women! I've never felt so full of mysterious power. Men are a joke.
We're so weak physically, so helpless with things. Still, even today. But we're stronger than they are. We can stand their cruelty. They can't stand ours.”

“Just those three words, said and meant. I love you.

They were quite hopeless. He said it as he might have said, I have cancer.

His fairy story.”

“It is me. I am his madness. For years he's been looking for something to put his madness into. And he found me.”

“I must fight with my weapons. Not his. Not selfishness and brutality and shame and resentment.”

“We all want things we can't have. Being a decent human being is accepting that.”

“Alive. Alive in the way that death is alive.”

“You must make, always. You must act, if you believe something. Talking about acting is like boasting about pictures you're going to paint. The most terrible bad form.”

“Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?”