Bayley Quotes

Interior design is a travesty of the architectural process and a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers - the rich.

It is the fragrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a sort of insecurity which some find titillating.

It is sometimes easier to have furniture made than to find things.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man's ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

I know of no case in which you are to have a judicial proceeding, by which a man is to be deprived of any part of his property, without his having an opportunity of being heard.

I have no particular interest in antiquities or antiques, but I like things to meet a certain aesthetic.

Vermeer's woman reading a letter is as full of latent or subliminal kitsch as Tolstoy's War and Peace.

The happiest marriages are full of alternative lives, lived in the head, unknown to the partner.

Every object and purpose of justice is effectually answered, and every supposed inconvenience is effectually rebutted by the law as it stands.

The laws of England will protect the rights of British subjects, and give a remedy for a grievance committed by one British subject upon another, in whatever country that may be done.

I wouldn't mind someone lobbing hand grenades at me, but having to reset the timer on the video recorder puts me into a blood-spitting frenzy.

You are what you pretend to be.

If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.

My wife and I both love cooking - I am an advanced male - so we argue about who gets to rustle up dinner.

One function of art is to de-kitschify kitsch.

Kitsch of course only comes into existence when we recognize how and why it works.

Taste is more to do with manners than appearances. Taste is both myth and reality; it is not a style.

That's one of the things about getting older isn't it? You suddenly realise that you are what you set out to be. And there are no role models any more.

You must never aspire to 'finish' a house, you can merely hope to start it, and from then on it's an evolutionary process.

I have a character failing. I am quite incapable of identifying with anything whole-heartedly. Whatever I am doing, I am always planning to do something else. I would rather travel than arrive.

Truly it is the hardest of all trials to see souls so dear in pains we cannot remedy.