“Like James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Woolf ’s first novel is a self-conscious meditation on the formation of an emergent intellectual and artist (a Ku¨nstlerroman).”

“Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.”

“What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.”

“THING TO TRY: If you are asked to describe a suspect to a police sketch artist, describe in precise detail, the features of the police sketch artist. This is one of the rare instances where two people can do one self-portrait.”

“It is important to recognise Woolf ’s acknowledgement of her father’s dually formative influence. The domesticdictator was also an intellectual who powerfully shaped her developing intellect, even if, at times, antithetically so: ‘just as a dog takes a bite of grass, I take a bite of him medicinally”

“When an artist improvises and plays, she allows her intuitive self to meet up with her conscious mind.”