Art

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

The primary benefit of practicing any art, whether well or badly, is that it enables one’s soul to grow.

A poet’s autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.

To be a poet is a condition rather than a profession.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job.

Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

A poem is less a thing than any other work of art.

The poet marries the language, and out of this marriage the poem is born.

A novel is a mirror which passes over a highway. Sometimes it reflects to your eyes the blue of the skies, at others the churned-up mud of the road.

A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.

When you’re a novelist, you’re writing a play but you’re acting all the parts, you’re controlling the lights and the scenery and the whole business, and it’s your show.

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

To turn events into ideas is the function of literature.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay—in solid cash— the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

The North American Indian was a type of the sportsman warrior gentleman. The Periclean Athenian was a type of the intellectually and artistically cultivated gentleman. Both were political failures. The modern gentleman, without the hardihood of the one or the culture of the other, has the appetite of both put together. He will not succeed where they failed.

Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he really is very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.