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

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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