Sublime

OF ALL THE CREATIVE PEOPLE I have come across, Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895–1972) was easily the most dedicated to the business of making beautiful things. His work absorbed him totally, and there was no room in his life for anything or anyone else. When the cultural revolution of the 1960s, that disastrous decade, made it impossible (as he saw it)

“Just that. Listen, wasn’t it Odo who said that where there’s property there’s theft?” “ ‘To make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws.’

It may well be the sentence that for diverse reasons—because thinking about Woolf, or sickness, or essays, because trying to emulate a certain rhythm in my own writing—I’ve copied out by hand more than any other.

“A man must be a very great genius to make up for being such a loathsome human being.” (I guess she would know.)

ou can hear in the delaying rhythms of the opening sentence the influence of Marcel Proust and the digressive, paid-by-the-word style of Thomas De Quincey, whose essays Woolf had lately looked into for the first time

Italo Calvino once remarked, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star, a flashback to a time when writers could be, more than simply respected or well regarded, famous.