Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

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

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

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.

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

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.

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

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

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say—your professional poets, I mean—there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.