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Quotes

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

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

—Flannery O’Connor, 1964

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.

—Tennessee Williams, 1944

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

—James Thurber, 1955

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

—Blaise Pascal, c. 1657

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.

—Raymond Chandler, 1945

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

—W.H. Auden, c. 1940

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1928

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

—André Malraux, 1951

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.

—Horace, c. 35 BC

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

—Charles Baudelaire, 1852

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1480