"Like all art dealers, Hugh believed himself to be an integral part of the creative process. As if it would be foolish for any painter to embark on a new work without first conferring with the man who would later sell it. He didn't really want Noonan to stop painting it, of course. Though unfinished, it was still the best canvas in the room, and Hugh had to know it. Even as he suggested the painting wasn't salable, he was busy coming up with a plan to do just that. What he was really after was the story behind it. People who bought art at these prices were hungry for backstory, gossip they could repeat to their friends. Here, Hugh could explain, was one of Robert Noonan's final canvases, begun when he'd first become aware of the illness that would eventually kill him. Ka-ching!

Talk. Vital to commerce. The end of art."

--Richard Russo, Bridge of Sighs

"Popular revolutionary violence was not some sort of boiling subterranean lava that finally forced its way to the onto the surface of French politics and then proceeded to scald all those who stepped in its way. Perhaps it would be better to think of the revolutionary elite as rash geologists, themselves gouging open great holes in the crust of polite discourse and then feeding the angry matter through the pipes of their rhetoric out into the open. Volcanoes and steam holes do not seem innapropriate metaphors here, because contemporaries were themselves constantly invoking them."

--Simon Schama, Citizens