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 transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.