“If you bring your sexual impulses to your creative work… you’ll be working from deep in the genetic code, down where life wants to make new life and feel good in the process.”

 Eric Maisel

“Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.”

Malcolm Gladwell

“I’ve never read anything so badly written that got published. It made Twilight look like War and Peace.”

Salman Rushdie on ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’

“For God’s sake, let’s take the word ‘possess’ and put a brick round its neck and drown it … We can’t possess one another. We can only give and hazard all we have.”

Dorothy L. Sayers, Busman’s Honeymoon

“No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow – and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.”

Kenneth Clark

“Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac”

Timothy Leary

“Involuntary physiological reactions such as the wetness of a vagina and the stiffness of a penis are emotionally so satisfying (which means, simultaneously, so erotic) because they signal a kind of approval that lies utterly beyond rational manipulation. Erections and lubrication simply cannot be effected by willpower and are therefore particularly true and honest indices […]

“Many Japanese painters and calligraphers would change their names intentionally to keep their relationship to the art always fresh. This way, others’ expectations can be avoided.”

“Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary, description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman’s erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.”

Peter Brooks

Image: Bardot in Godard’s ‘Contempt’ 1963