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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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

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.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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.

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.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term art, I should call it “the reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of “artist.”

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.

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