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

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.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

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.”

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