Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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.

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

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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 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.

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.

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

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.