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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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.

Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

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.