We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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.

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

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.

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 lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say—your professional poets, I mean—there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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.

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

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.

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.