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

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.

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.

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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