What was any art but a mold to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself- life hurrying past us and running away, to strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

I tell you, there is such a thing as creative hate! A contempt that drives you through fire, makes you risk everything and lose everything, makes you a long sight better than you ever knew you could be.

It seems to me that the pleasure one feels in a work of art is just one thing that one does not have to explain.

[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.

Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.