「Quotes」

「Like a bomb exploding in reverse. Thoughts, ideas... fragments of images. Shards of memory, like shrapnel, all come back to me, and are forced back out in a cruel pastiche of experience.」


「And who might you be? You're not much of a burglar, are you? Take your cloths off. Come to bed. And you can have whatever you want.」


「Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.」


「When I went into the house of pleasure, I didn't stay in the room where they celebrate acceptable modes of loving in the bourgeois style. I went into the rooms which are kept secret and I leaned and lay on their beds. I went into the rooms which are kept secret which they consider it shameful even to name. But there is no such shame for me because then, what sort of poet, and what sort of artist would I be?」


「Some seem to think my work is drawn from an expression of horror, which has never really concerned me. Pleasure is impossible to define. And I feel horror occupies much the same territory. But, you see, I'm optimistic by nature. I'm optimistic about nothing.」


「I watch him while he's sleeping. A prisoner of dreams. Fighting the battle he's always going to lose. But I'm powerless to help him as I'm powerless to help myself. So I watch and wait.」


「This painful inability to sustain relationships. The selfishness my work demands leaves no room for an emotional self. Can tenderness ultimately only manifest itself in the motion of a brush? Even this remains invisible. The visceral reach, running fingertips along the curved notches of a spine. The line of a femur, the curl of tendon into muscle. The smell. To violate, desecrate, to examine a person from the inside, eroticizing the white shirt cuff glimpsed beneath a dark suit. The girth, the solids, the sack of flesh, just offal bags. Ruminating intestines. Fine wines filled and swilled with rich food, trying to create some distance between myself and some dead lover.」


「We're all in our own private personal prison. And you never see the blood until your throat is cut.」


「There's a fleeting substance to reality. Ghostlike deposits. Sometimes, a man's shadow is more in the room than he is. The void which spreads across his face as he daydreams is the void of death.」


「Once a stone has been polished, you can't return it to the rough. A flower that has been picked has only one fate. That's why whores consider it bad luck to receive cut flowers. They know that they are going to die.」


「They say you're pure horror. The morbid poet of the world of evil. Great artist. Great art. Evil and vicious.」


「What mad misfortunes make his eyes blaze with despair? I dream of some tough lover. Big as the Universe, his body blemished by shadows. He'll crush me, naked, in gloomy bars between his golden thighs. A mundane yob transformed into an archangel. Is my lover to be my assassin? Or I his? Loneliness - my only true companion - will always rival any lover. Its greedy desire... always drive a wedge between me and any contender for my company. And I question myself; do I possess some inner destructive demon?」


「Every time the chance of death. First the waiting, always and endless. A form of time inexpressible. Seconds stretched across expectation. And always endless.」


「What about Paris? Am I still coming?
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The man had killed the thing he loved and so he had to die. Of course you're coming. You are the exhibition!」


「George is becoming tedious. He's a tragedy waiting to happen. It reminds me of my dear friend Peter. Like George, he was a little bit greedy. A sort of compulsive joke which no-one knew was funny. There was an inevitability. His shadow always chasing him.」


「The paintings of George are like exquisite love poems. That's the irony of the George pictures. You seem to put more into the work than into the relationship itself. And, ultimately, you suffer just as much.」


「Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.」


「George, I am a painter, this is a studio, that is a painting. You are in the way.
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But it's a painting of me. Not that anyone would bloody well notice.
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Thank you for the critique, George. I feel much better now I know where I stand. After that enlightening discussion, will you just piss off!
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Will I see you later? Tomorrow?
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Oh, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.」


「In all the motor accidents I've seen, people strewn across the road, the first thing you think of is the strange beauty, the vision of it, before you think of trying to do anything. It's to do with the unusualness of it. I once saw a bad car accident on the large road, and the bodies were strewn about with broken glass from the car and the blood and the various possessions, and it was, in fact, very beautiful. I think the beauty in it is terribly elusive, but it just happened to be the disposition of the bodies, the way they lay in the blood.」


「George's suicide attempts are so adolescent. Of course it's a cry for attention but he seems to turn it into a sort of art. He never really wants to die. He just does it to find out if he can hurt me.
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I know how much he means to you. And I know your tastes lead you onto the beaten track, but I know George and I know he'd never really hurt you.」


「Time is not a healing instrument of all. Bollocks. I'd miss her. I'd miss her sweaty armpits. Her socks. I'd miss the stubble dried round the bathroom sink when I go to shave. I'd miss the sound of his key as it turns in the lock. I'd like just one more night of cowering under him. One more night of love, of true affection. And a few more days of tenderness. But, after all, in the end, what's left? A pile of bones and a few teeth.」


「I love you, Francis.」


「Everything is running down. The sun is burning out, the stars are burning out. It's the only thing in life that's certain - that it's all running down. It's all dying.」