Art

[ Of Marilyn Monroe :] Marilyn was mean. Terribly mean. The meanest woman I have ever met around this town. I have never met anybody as mean as Marilyn Monroe nor as utterly fabulous on the screen, and that includes Garbo.

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.

[ Reply when asked, as an Oxford undergraduate, why he was staring raptly at a pair of vases on his mantelpiece :] Oh, would that I could live up tomy blue china!

There are works which wait, and which one does not understand for a long time; the reason is that they bring answers to questions which have not yet been raised; for the question often arrives a terribly long time after the answer.

I have been correcting the proofs of my poems. In the morning, after hard work, I took a comma out of one sentence. . . . In the afternoon, I put it back again.

I have put my genius into my life; I have put only my talent into my works.

California is an Italy without its art. There are subjects for the artist, but it is universally true that the only scenery which inspires utterance is that which man feels himself the master of. The mountains of California are so gigantic that they are not favorable to art or poetry. There are good poets in England but none in Switzerland. There the mountains are too high. Art cannot add to nature.

As for borrowing Mr. Whistler’s ideas about art, the only thoroughly original ideas I have ever heard him express have had reference to his own superiority as a painter over painters greater than himself.

Over the piano was printed a notice: Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.

I treated Art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction: I awoke the imaginationof my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. . . . The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring: I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men and the colors of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder.

Crime belongs exclusively to the lower orders. I don’t blame them in the smallest degree. I should fancy that crime was to them what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations.

The essay simply represents an artistic standpoint, and in aesthetic criticism attitude is everything. For in art there is no such thing as a universal truth. A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true.

The proper school to learn art in is not Life but Art.

The criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation. It does not confine itself . . . to discovering the real intention of the artist and accepting that as final.

All art is immoral. . . . For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life, and of that practical organization of life that we call society.

[George] Meredith’s a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as medium for writing in prose.

Pathology is rapidly becoming the basis of sensational literature, and in art, as in politics, there is a great future for monsters.

That he is indeed one of the very greatest masters of painting is my opinion. And I may add that in this opinion Mr. Whistler himself entirely concurs.

[ Response when asked which film directors he mostadmired :] I like the old masters, by which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.

[ Of a Hollywood movie studio :] This is the biggest electric train [set] any boy ever had!

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

[ Of Ronald Reagan :] A triumph of the embalmer’s art.