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

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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.