“A woman is supposed to have curves like an old Bentley, not like some old bike.”
“Pain can be vitalising; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don’t suffer, how do we know that we live?”
“If I hear that people are litigious, I immediately dismiss them.”
“I live my life like an open book, even though it’s open on the wrong page.”
“My theory is that the way you cope with the depths will ascertain the heights that you reach – they are intimately connected – and if you have a lust for life, you are also going to have a lust for death.”
“Being a dandy is a condition rather than a profession. It is a defense against suffering and a celebration of life.”
“Why shouldn’t I be allowed to say stupid, outrageous things?”
“Dandyism is a lie which reveals the truth, and the truth is that we are what we pretend to be.”
“You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things, all a man’s endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach.”
“The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic.”
“I don’t talk, I quote. I can’t help it. It’s better to be quotable than honest.”
“I am not an intellectual. An intellectual is someone who looks at a sausage and thinks of Picasso, whereas I just say ‘pass the mustard’.”
“If I want to dislike women, I should be allowed to. As it happens, I love them. Women to me are privately worshipped and publicly disdained.”
“I consider myself to be very correct and proper: an upright citizen.”
“Think of how many boring, blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretion of me.”
“I like to remind myself that every morning I’m making a choice to live.”
“I used to have about a hundred suits in my late twenties and early thirties when my stock was riding high and I was rich.”
“I like living sparsely. In the main room, there’s no furniture – no tables, no chairs, no coffee table – not even a decaffeinated coffee table.”
“I keep the shutters closed because I like to work in a hermetic environment. I like mirrors. When you look out of the window, all you see is ugliness, but when you look in the mirror all you see is beauty.”
“I do a lot of things for effect, which is not to say I am superficial, but that I know how to put ideas across.”
“I think you are born, and I think you die. I have a pragmatic nature, but I yearn to believe.”
“My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway.”
“An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more.”
“The problem with compassion is that it is not photogenic.”
“I regret everything. But so what? At least I have cause.”
“If someone thinks I’m posh, it just shows how lowly they are. Some people think I went to Eton. I’m far too stupid to get into Eton.”
“Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn’t – he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere – much more Calvinistic, more neurotic – it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.”
“I am half-Byronic, half-moronic; part-shaman, part-showman.”
“People who have a reputation for being evil are usually good.”
“I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet.”
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