‘the housewife’s disease’ has taken hold of me. The tension in me, so that peace has already gone away from me, is because the current has been switched on: I must-dress-Janet-get-her-breakfast-send-her-off-to-school-get-Michael’s-breakfast-don’t-forget-I’m-out-of-tea-etc.-etc.

When someone says we ought to separate the art from the artist, they’re saying: Remove the stain. Let the work be unstained. But that’s not how stains work.

Maybe shame is the ultimate expression of the parasocial relationship. Our emotions, collapsed together with those of the artists we love, leave us vulnerable in ways that are entirely new in the internet era.

He became his own fame, a fame that was interwoven with his masculinity. He became a human synecdoche for the condition of literary virility.

The genius dominates, but he has another face, too: he’s also a servant. A servant to what? Well, to his own genius.

Everyone who was a girl in the 1970s knows this feeling: running your hand along the spines of biographies in the school library, looking for any title at all about a woman, and winding up reading about…Clara Barton? Fine, okay, Clara Barton. If that’s all there is.

Their terribleness was their calling card. Life is so dull. With a bad man around, something is very likely to happen.

It was a room that suggested—all those books—that human problems could be solved by the application of careful thought and considered ethics.

what do we do about the monstrous people we love?