Art

Gossip is the art-form of the man and woman in the street, and the proper subject for gossip, as for all art, is the behavior of mankind.

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.

To rest in the arms of perfection is the desire of any man intent upon creating excellence.

Eloquence is a painting of thought.

Dreams are the true interpreters of our inclinations; but there is art required to sort and understand them.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.

you kill the monster and fling him to the public.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.

There are two kinds of truth: the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art.

Artists are the antennae of the race.

Thought works in silence, so does virtue. One might erect statues to silence.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

The serious artist . . . is like an object caught by a wave and swept to shore. He’s obsessed by his material; it’s like a venom working in his blood and the art is the antidote.

If the artist does not fling himself, without reflecting, into his work . . . as the soldier flings himself into the enemy’s trenches, and if, once in this crater, he does not work like a miner . . . he is simply looking on at the suicide of his own talent.

The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small “yes” at the center of a vast “no.”

A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is essentially anonymous about it.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

A good quotation must be a complete entity. It must be like a headline—sharp, clear, whole.