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

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.

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.

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 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.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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 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.

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.

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