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.

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.

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 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.

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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

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

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.

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