Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

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

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

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.

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.