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

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

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

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.

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