The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.