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 always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do—that was one of my favorite things about it—and when I first did it, I felt perverse.

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

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

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

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

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

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

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

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.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

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.