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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

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

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.

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.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

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.

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

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

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.