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

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

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 lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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

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 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.

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

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, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.