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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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