Others

I cannot write in verse, for I am no poet. I cannot arrange the parts of speech with such art as to produce effects of light and shade, for I am no painter. Even by signs and gestures I cannot express my thoughts and feelings, for I am no dancer. But I can do so by means of sounds, for I am a musician.

Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

Grammar, which knows how to control even kings.

Le Malade Imaginaire .

Par ma foi! il y a plus de quarante ans que je dis de la prose sans que j’en susse rien .

All that is not prose is verse; and all that is not verse is prose.

Grow your tree of falsehood from a small grain of truth.

This then? This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty . . . what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key, perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse.

[ On the completion of the Sistine chapel ceiling :] I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.

There are people who read too much: the bibliobibuli. I know some who are constantly drunk on books, as other men are drunk on whiskey or religion. They wander through this most diverting and stimulating of worlds in a haze, seeing nothing and hearing nothing.

There are no mute, inglorious Miltons, save in the hallucinations of poets. The one sound test of a Milton is that he functions as a Milton.

The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.

The public . . . demands certainties. . . . But there are no certainties.

The virulence of the national appetite for bogus revelation.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.

Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.

[Thomas Carlyle] loves silence somewhat platonically.

From the earliest times the old have rubbed it into the young that they are wiser than they, and before the young had discovered what nonsense this was they were old too, and it profited them to carry on the imposture.

I want to reach that state of condensation of sensations which constitutes a picture.

[ Groucho Marx speaking :] Come, Kapellmeister, let the violas throb! My regiment leaves at dawn.

Poetry is what Milton saw when he went blind.

We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace .