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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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.

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

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.

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.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.