You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writersomething old-adamish, incompatible to the "ordinary world.

Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement — meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object.

Why has mankind had such a craving to be imposed upon? Why this lust after imposing creeds, imposing deeds, imposing buildings, imposing language, imposing works of art? The thing becomes an imposition and a weariness at last. Give us things that are alive and flexible, which won't last too long and become an obstruction and a weariness. Even Michelangelo becomes at last a lump and a burden and a bore. It is so hard to see past him.

But the effort, the effort! And as the marrow is eaten out of a man's bones and the soul out of his belly, contending with the strange rapacity of savage life, the lower stage of creation, he cannot make the effort any more.

Never was an age more sentimental, more devoid of real feeling, more exaggerated in false feeling, than our own.

Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.

A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.