Half of all the great art and literature in existence went unrecognised during the lifetimes of its creators.

We are now living in an age of literary exhaustion; we get used to the bleak landscape. Cyril Connolly said that the writer's business is to produce masterpieces; but what masterpieces have been produced in the past fifty years?

Painting is silent poetry.

We are going to have perhaps a thousand years of non-representational painting.

I don’t have much time for the idea that art is some languorous thing on the sidelines, and that you have to wait 50 years before you address a subject…

writers without books, poets without verses, painters without pictures p198

Like writing, paintings seem to hint at a topsy-turvy world in which, so to speak, time’s arrow moves the other way.

To seduce most writers, painting must be literary, that is to say, on the borders of the bad.

[Painting is..] a kind of war between the moment and the pull of memory.(quote in 1959)

Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting

Art, like a lot of things, is a lost art.

In 250 years, reading and writing will have turned out to be a fad.

The act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghostlike.

My art, science fiction writing, is pretty new as literary arts go, but it labors under the curse of three thousand years of literacy. In some weird sense I'm in direct competition with Homer and Euripides.