All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

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

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

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

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.

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.

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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.”