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.

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.

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

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.

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

I don’t believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there’s one thing that’s dangerous for an artist, it’s precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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.