First edition of Virginia Woolf's On Being Ill, with cover art by Vanessa Bell, 1930 (source)
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"I should be reading Ulysses, and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first 2 or 3 chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom [T. S. Eliot], think this on a par with War and Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me; the book of a self taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating. When one can have the cooked flesh, why have the raw. But I think if you are anaemic, as Tom is, there is a glory in blood. Being fairly normal myself I am soon ready for the classics again. I may revise this later. I do not compromise my critical sagacity. I plant a stick in the ground to mark page 200."
— Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 16 August 1922
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"We have got up at dawn every morning and gone to bed (on the floor) at 8:30. We have slept in ruined huts; made fires of pomegranate-wood and dried camel-dung; boiled eggs; lost all sense of civilisation; returned to the primitive state in which one thinks only of food, water, and sleep."
— Vita Sackville-West, from a letter to Virginia Woolf dated 30 March 1927 from Persepolis
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"What do I ask of a painting? I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince."
— Lucian Freud
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Paul Roche in Greece on the set of the film Oedipus the King. Photographed by Patrick Ward. (source)