We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

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

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

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.”