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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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

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.

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

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.

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.