Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If a king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.

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.

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

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

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

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.

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