Art

Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love.

The final test for a novel will be our affection for it, as it is the test of our friends, and of anything else which we cannot define.

Friendship is not necessary, like philosophy, like art....

The Oklahoma Ligno and Lithograph Co Weeps at a nude by Michael Angelo.

 

That which probably hears more stupidities than anything else in the world is a painting in a museum.

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital “I.”

[ To a customs official upon arriving in New York in 1882 :] I have nothing to declare but my genius.

It’s with my brush that I make love.

When I was a child my mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Ce n’est pas une image juste, c’est juste une image.

But I have long thought that if you knew a column of advertisements by heart, you could achieve unexpected felicities with them. You can get a happy quotation anywhere if you have the eye.

 

Men are idolaters, and want something to look at and kiss and hug, or throw themselves down before; they always did, they always will; and if you don’t make it of wood, you must make it of words.

A poet on Pegasus, reciting his own verses, is hardly more to be dreaded than a mounted specialist.

An artist who works in marble or colors has them all to himself and his tribe, but the man who moulds his thought in verse has to employ the materials vulgarized by everybody's use, and glorify them by his handling.

The great philosophers are poets who believe in the reality of their poems.

It is perfectly easy to be original by violating the laws of decency and the canons of good taste.

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

[I]t is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

A novel is based on evidence, + or -x, the unknown quantity being the temperament of the novelist, and the unknown quantity always modifies the effect of the evidence, and sometimes transforms it entirely.

Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms and social intercourse.

A critic has no right to the narrowness which is the frequent prerogative of the creative artist.

Although the novel exercises the rights of a created object, criticism has not those rights, and too many little mansions in English fiction have been acclaimed to their own detriment as important edifices.