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.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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.

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

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.

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