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

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.

If a king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.

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

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.”

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.

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

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.

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.

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say—your professional poets, I mean—there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

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