Sebastian Horsley

“I have wanted only one thing to make me happy. That thing is everything.”

“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 l...”

“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...”

“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.”

“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 endle...”

“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.”

“Being a dandy is a condition rather than a profession. It is a defense against suffering and a celebration of life.”

“I used to have about a hundred suits in my late twenties and early thirties when my stock was riding high and I was rich.”

“The universe is neither friendly nor hostile. It is merely indifferent. This makes me ecstatic.”

“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.”

“My grandfather was a practising Quaker. My father was a nihilist. But nihilism, if you like, is the beginning of faith anyway.”

“I live my life like an open book, even though it's open on the wrong page.”

“I keep the shutters closed because I like to work in a hermetic environment. I like mirrors. When you look out of the window, all you see is ugliness, but when you look in the mirror all you...”

“Pain can be vitalising; it gives intensity in the place of vagueness and emptiness. If we don't suffer, how do we know that we live?”