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 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.

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

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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 transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.

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