Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

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

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

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