She is like a revolving lighthouse; pitch darkness alternating with a dazzling brilliancy!
I’ve always expected the worst, and it’s always worse than I expected.
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.
One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.
The girl had a certain nobleness of imagination, which rendered her a good many services and played her a great many tricks.
The artist is present in every page of every book from which he sought so assiduously to eliminate himself.
My sole wish is to frustrate as utterly as possible the post-mortem exploiter.
In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.
If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?
Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better.
Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its importance.
Art requires, above all things, a suppression of self, a subordination of one’s self to an idea.
All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.
There’s no more usual basis of union than mutual misunderstanding.
To believe in a child is to believe in the future. Through their aspirations they will save the world. With their combined knowledge the turbulent seas of hate and injustice will be calmed.
I have lived too long in foreign parts.
Any point of view is interesting that is a direct impression of life. You each have an impression colored by your individual conditions; make that into a picture, a picture framed by your own personal wisdom, your glimpse of the American world.
I’ve struck up a tremendous intimacy with Conte Alberto, and we literally can’t live without each other. He is the first object my eyes greet in the morning, and the last at night.
Always keep a window in the attic open; not just cracked: open.
Don’t try so much to form your character – it’s like trying to pull open a tight, tender young rose. Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.