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.

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

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

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.”

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.

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

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