Quotes from Robert Dessaix

A form of art that I like is portraiture. I've been thinking about portraiture, and its relationship to writing and literature, biography and autobiography, and so that will be my next thing.

How do you irradiate the humbly trivial - the sneezes and waiting in bus-queues - with the lofty, and at the same time cherish above all in the lofty those things that nourish you here, today, in all your ordinariness? I cannot understand, in other words, what sort of God would bother to count every hair on my head.

Is happy the same as contented do you think?... as I see it, happiness is something that comes in bursts from outside – love at first sight, winning at chess, getting good news. Happiness is something that seizes you. ...I think of contentment as an everyday thing. It's what you feel when you don't want anything more – until you do. It's nice, but it needs a shot of happiness now and again.

undertow'. It describes (...) how underneath our own everyday lives - the shopping and squabbles and weeding and trips to the vet - there's a sense of being dragged slowly off, not against our will but regardless of it. And fighting the undertow, as children are quick to learn, is not usually the best way of getting back to the beach. Floating along with it, on the other hand, can be fatal. It's really the struggle, the argument with oneself, that interests...

A liberating way to view time, I find, is as splodges lying in clusters all around me. Instead of hopping obediently from link to link along a chain toward extinction, I pause in a puddle of it here and wallow in a pool of it there.

John Cleese, in a clever, funny talk he gave on creativity years ago, said you also need a sense of humour if you want to be creative. You can't manufacture a sense of humour, but if you don't have one, then you might indeed be better off reporting facts. Art is not about reporting.

But life isn't about finding yourself or finding anything, Dylan said, it's about creating yourself.

She loves throwing things out. At home alone during the week before she fell over all she did was throw things out – blouses, old dinner-sets, shoes, vases, mugs, sheets and rugs. It excited her to empty cupboards, to wipe down the empty shelves, to take the things we were throwing out to the tip, she loved our trips to the tip, her mind quickened at the prospect of the tip.

I hardly have the words to analyse why I like or love a piece of music – I have words, of course, but a layman's words, I don't really know what a cadence is, let alone a Phrygian cadence or an augmented sixth.

Best not to say what you think in order to give offence, obviously, not if you're nice, as we are. Whatever you say, though, someone will feel offended. On that question, I rather side with the Stoics, The Stoics held that offence has to be taken, it can't just be given, so we should try not to take it in the first place.

Those are the two things: a sense of loving and being loved, and being creative - that is what life is made up of, and what literature reminds us of.

Wonder - the sensation of being whisked out of time and space...to be bathed in ... epiphanous delight.

Every time you watch a performance in the theatre, you know that this is just for you, and will never be the same again. It is quite exciting for me.

In the theatre, you are in love with what is on the stage, with the moment. You just don't get that with movies or videos, or TV, where you know that what you are seeing is repeatable.

You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.