It is very vulgar to talk about one's own business. Only people like stockbrokers do that, and then only at dinner parties.

There are few of us who have not sometimes wakened before dawn, either after one of those dreamless nights that make one almost enamoured of death, or one of those nights of horror and misshapen joy, when through the chambers of the brain sweep phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy, especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie.

I can't stand people that do not take food seriously.

You know we poor artists have to show ourselves in society from time to time, just to remind the public that we are not savages.

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.

Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry.