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.

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.

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

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

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.

If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.

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

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

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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

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.”

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.