The upshot was, my paintings must burn that English artists might finally learn.

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

We have to hate our immediate predecessors, to get free from their authority.

The true artist doesn't substitute immorality for morality. On the contrary, he always substitutes a finer morality for a grosser one.

It is so much more difficult to live with one's body than with one's soul. One's body is so much more exacting: what it won't have it won't have, and nothing can make bitter into sweet.

Behold then Septimus Dodge returning to Dodge-town victorious. Not crowned with laurel, it is true, but wreathed in lists of things he has seen and sucked dry. Seen and sucked dry, you know: Venus de Milo, the Rhine or the Coliseum: swallowed like so many clams, and left the shells.

Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it.