A biography for Sebastian Horsleyhasn’t been written yet.
“Think of how many boring, blameless lives are brightened by the blazing indiscretion of me.”
“I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet.”
“I live my life like an open book, even though it's open on the wrong page.”
“I can count all the lovers I've had on one hand...if I'm holding a calculator.”
“I didn't want to tell Mother I worked as a journalist. She thought I was a prostitute. Locking yourself in a room and inventing characters and conversations which do not exit is no way for a grown man to behave.”
“If someone thinks I'm posh, it just shows how lowly they are. Some people think I went to Eton. I'm far too stupid to get into Eton.”
“An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more.”
“The motivation of all artists is 'Look at me, Mum'.”
“If I want to dislike women, I should be allowed to. As it happens, I love them. Women to me are privately worshipped and publicly disdained.”
“I have wanted only one thing to make me happy. That thing is everything.”
“Self-pity is the most destructive of all narcotics.”
“My theory is that the way you cope with the depths will ascertain the heights that you reach - they are intimately connected - and if you have a lust for life, you are also going to have a lust for death.”
“Everyone says Oscar Wilde was a dandy, but he wasn't - he was an aesthete. He took pleasure in food and stuff like that. Dandyism is much more austere - much more Calvinistic, more neurotic - it oscillates between narcissism and neurosis.”
“You may look back on your life and accept it as good or evil. But it is far, far harder to admit that you have been completely unimportant; that in the great sum of things, all a man's endless grapplings are no more significant than the scuttlings of a cockroach.”
“I like living sparsely. In the main room, there's no furniture - no tables, no chairs, no coffee table - not even a decaffeinated coffee table.”