Art is inextricably tied to man's survival - not to his physical survival, but to that on which his physical survival depends: to the preservation and survival of his consciousness.

The dance is the silent partner of music and participates in a division of labor: music presents a stylized version of man’s consciousness in action—the dance presents a stylized version of man’s body in action.

It [ballet] projects a fragile kind of strength and a certain inflexible precision.

It [ballet] is a perfect medium for the expression of spiritual love.

A gracefully effortless floating, flowing and flying are the essentials of the ballet’s image of man.

In art, and in literature, the end and the means, or the subject and the style, must be worthy of each other.That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth re-creating in art.

A cardinal principle of good fiction [is]: the theme and the plot of a novel must be integrated—as thoroughly integrated as mind and body or thought and action in a rational view of man.

Art is a concretization of metaphysics. Art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.This is the psycho-epistemological function of art and the reason of its importance in man’s life (and the crux of the Objectivist esthetics)

Art (including literature) is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society’s deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence.