I never expected the White House to be warm, and the artwork on the walls was extraordinary. I am a fan of the Louvre, but being there it was almost just as good.
Mystery is like a kind of atmosphere which bathes the greatest works of the masters.
You should definitely visit the Louvre, a world-famous art museum where you can view, at close range, the backs of thousands of other tourists trying to see the Mona Lisa.
When I went to Europe for the first time, I went to Paris and then to Venice. So after Paris, Venice was my first great European city, and it just blew me away.
Wall-to-wall masterpieces, after all, ought to be preferred to wall-to-wall decorative arts, even if the decorative arts are of the highest quality peppered and salted with dukes and tiaras.
The Louvre is the book in which we learn to read.
[On the British Museum:] It was manifestly impossible to read all the books in that huge, gloomy structure, but I made a good try and accumulated a fund of useless information guaranteed to cast a pall over any dinner table.
How is the newcomer to deal with Rome? What is one to make of this marble rubble, this milk of wolves, this blood of Caesars, this sunrise of Renaissance, this baroquery of blown stone, this warm hive of Italians, this antipasto of civilization?
Sometimes I say, If I had seen some masterpieces, maybe I wouldn't have dared start. I started very - not innocent, but naïve in a way.
Leonardo's Mona Lisa is just a thousand thousand smears of paint. Michelangelo's David is just a million hits with a hammer. We're all of us a million bits put together the right way.
To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I've ever seen them before.
