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

Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.

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.

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.”

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

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

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.