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.

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.”

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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.

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.