My mother's one idea was to sacrifice her life to her children and she had done nothing else since the death of my father. We wished that she had married again instead.

It is always assumed that Venice is the ideal place for a honeymoon. This is a grave error. To live in Venice or even to visit it means that you fall in love with the city itself. There is nothing left over in your heart for anyone else.

If anything can rival Venice in its beauty, it must be its reflection at sunset in the Grand Canal.

To go out in a gondola at night is to reconstruct in one's imagination the true Venice, the Venice of the past alive with romance, elopements, abductions, revenged passions, intrigues, adulteries, denouncements, unaccountable deaths, gambling, lute playing and singing.

I wore one of my Tanguy earrings and one made by Calder in order to show my impartiality between Surrealist and Abstract Art.

I look back on my life with great joy. I think it was a very successful life. I always did what I wanted and never cared what anyone thought. Women's lib? I was a liberated woman long before there was a name for it.

[On Venice:] Every hour of the day is a miracle of light. In summer with daybreak the rising sun produces such a tender magic on the water that it nearly breaks one's heart.

I don't collect anymore. Everything is so terribly expensive. I don't see anything I like anyhow.

[On amassing art for her collection:] My motto was 'Buy a picture a day' and I lived up to it.

Venice is not only a city of fantasy and freedom. It is also a city of joy and pleasure.

I took advice from none but the best. I listened, how I listened! That's how I finally became my own expert.