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

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

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

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

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

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.

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

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

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.

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.