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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.