Not quite sure where I’m going with this yet, but this is the pithiest, funniest, most salient and supremely quotable book I’ve read all year. Andy Warhol really was a genius. In a singular, weird, unadjectival Andy Warhol way.

He takes on all the BIG subjects without fear or hesitation: love (prime); love (puberty); love (senility); beauty; fame; work; time; art; success; money; atmosphere…

All are deep and shallow at the same time. Uncompromising. Contradictory yet sharply focused. His style is so direct and readable. He manages to combine absolute frivolity with honest insight. Something you might want for a certain type of poem but can’t quite attain tonally.

One of my favourite chapters is on work.

‘After being alive, the next hardest work is having sex. Of course, for some people it isn’t work because they need the exercise and they’ve got the energy for the sex and the sex gives them more energy. Some people get energy from sex and some people lose energy from sex. I have found that it’s too much work. But if you have time for it, and you need that exercise – then you should do it. But you could really save yourself a lot of trouble either way by first figuring out whether you’re an energy-getter or an energy-loser…It’s just as much work for an attractive person not to have sex as it is for an unattractive person to have sex, so it’s helpful if the attractive people happen to get energy from sex and the unattracitve people happen to lose energy from sex, because then their wants will fit in with the direction people are pushing them in.’

I’ve decided one of my themes over the summer will be love. Summer is the best time for such a theme. Andy Warhol had a lot to say about love. Not sure he got or gave a lot: maybe in his own special way. In fact, he has such a horror of intimacy and being touched one wonders if he was mildly autistic. The brilliant thing is I don’t know much about his biography other than the broadly iconic stuff; so I got to know him through his philosophy.

Sex, though, is not love, but it can be confused with love. I remember my dad warning me about such folly years ago, but I didn’t talk about that sort of thing with him then and I still don’t. I like the way he talks about sex under ‘work’ though. No confusion there. I’ve also been thinking about writing about love in the sixties. Andy Warhol is a 75 degree turn from The Beatles – or thereabouts. Or perhaps 180. More on this later.