No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

How clever you are, my dear! You never mean a single word you say.

I want my food dead. Not sick, not dying, dead.

Pleasure without Champagne is purely artificial.

The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. ... One might point out how the Renaissance was great, because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great, individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist.

Marriage is hardly a thing one can do now and then, except in America.

He had uttered a mad wish that he himself might remain untarnished, and the face on the canvas bear the burden of his passions and his sins; that the painted image might be seared with the lines of suffering and thought, and that he might keep all the delicate bloom and loveliness of his then just conscious boyhood.