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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

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.

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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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 making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.

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

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.

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

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.