Art is like baby shoes. When you coat them with gold, they can no longer be worn.

The firmest house in my fiction, probably, is the little thick-walled sandstone farmhouse of 'The Centaur' and 'Of the Farm'; I had lived in that house, and can visualize every floorboard and bit of worn molding.

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

A seventeenth-century house tends to be short on frills like hallways and closets; you must improvise.

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

As I take my shoes from the shoemaker, and my coat from the tailor, so I take my religion from the priest