Art and Literature

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

Gilbert K. Chesterton, in Art and Literature

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa, in Art and Literature

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.

Voltaire, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Paul Valéry, in Art and Literature

Just the omission of Jane Austen's books alone would make a fairly good library out of a library that hadn't a book in it.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

If poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it better not come at all.

John Keats, in Art and Literature

I would rather be attacked than unnoticed. For the worst thing you can do to an author is to be silent as to his works.

Samuel Johnson, in Art and Literature

Dictionaries are like watches: the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Samuel Johnson, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

What is written without effort is in general read without pleasure.

Samuel Johnson, in Art and Literature and Work and Recreation

I live for books.

Thomas Jefferson, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

Love affairs have always greatly interested me, but I do not greatly care for them in books or moving pictures. In a love affair, I wish to be the hero, with no audience present.

E. W. Howe, in Art and Literature and Love and Hate

These are not books, lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves.

Gilbert Highet, in Art and Literature

A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody has read.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature and Wisdom and Ignorance

I don't give a damn for a man that can only spell a word one way.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't.

Mark Twain, in Art and Literature

Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.

Igor Stravinsky, in Art and Literature

In a painting I want to say something comforting.

Vincent van Gogh, in Art and Literature

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Edmond Jules Goncourt, in Art and Literature

Let's have some new clichés.

Samuel Goldwyn, in Art and Literature

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Gustave Flaubert, in Art and Literature