The nature of men and women - their essential nature - is so vile and despicable that if you were to portray a person as he really is, no one would believe you.

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

We do not write because we want to; we write because we have to.

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

Our natural egoism leads us to judge people by their relations to ourselves. We want them to be certain things to us, and for us that is what they are; because the rest of them is no good to us, we ignore it.

Reverie is the groundwork of creative imagination; it is the privilege of the artist that with him it is not as with other men an escape from reality, but the means by which he accedes to it.

It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. - Of Human Bondage