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.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

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

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.

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, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

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.

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.

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

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.