This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

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.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

I cannot live without books, but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”

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

If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.