Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

What I've discovered is that in art, as in music, there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love.

Where thou art, that is home.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.