If a nation's literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.
It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.
Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.
A man of genius has a right to any mode of expression.
Men do not understand books until they have a certain amount of life, or at any rate no man understands a deep book, until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.
The modern artist must live by craft and violence. His gods are violent gods. Those artists, so called, whose work does not show this strife, are uninteresting.
Technique is the test of sincerity. If a thing isn't worth getting the technique to say, it is of inferior value.
Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.
If I could believe the Quakers banned music because church music is so damn bad, I should view them with approval.
The act of bell ringing is symbolic of all proselytizing religions. It implies the pointless interference with the quiet of other people.
The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.
I have always thought the suicide should bump off at least one swine before taking off for parts unknown.
Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man.
But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
Wars are made to make debt.
Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.
The jargon of sculptors is beyond me. I do not know precisely why I admire a green granite female, apparently pregnant monster with one eye going around a square corner.
People find ideas a bore because they do not distinguish between live ones and stuffed ones on a shelf.
