A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

The artist, like the scientist, in the process of evolution of art and science, is always casting around, understanding a little more than his predecessor, penetrating further with a keener and more brilliant eye—and this is the artistic result.

At eight, he had once told his mother that he wanted to paint air.

We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.

as if it were a point of honor—which, indeed, a point of art often is.

Perhaps what matters is not the human pain or joy at all but, rather, the play of shadow and light on a live body, the harmony of trifles assembled...in a unique and inimitable way.