Nobody likes having salt rubbed into their wounds, even if it is the salt of the earth.

There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect.

... it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.

There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

works of art feel towards human beings exactly as we do towards ghosts. The transparency of spectres, the diffuseness in space which lets them drift through doors and walls, and their smell of death, disgust us not more than we disgust works of art by our meaninglessness, our diffuseness in time which lets us drift through three score years and ten without a quarter as much significance as a picture establishes instantaneously.