It is the stupid and the ugly who have the best of it in this world

I hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who would call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one.

Where there is sorrow, there is holy ground.

Art creates an incomparable and unique effect, and, having done so, passes on to other things. Nature, upon the other hand, forgetting that that imitation can be made the sincerest form of insult, keeps on repeating this effect until we all become absolutely wearied of it.

I delight in men over seventy. They always offer one the devotion of a lifetime.

There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another.