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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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

I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.