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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

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

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.