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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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 is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.”

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.