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A book is a mirror; if an ass peers into it, you can't expect an apostle to look out.
G. C. Lichtenberg

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

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

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

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

Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
P. J. O'Rourke

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

Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.
Jorge Luis Borges

Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.
Voltaire

Art is a deliberate recreation of a new and special reality that grows from your response to life. It cannot be copied; it must be created.
Unknown

Art is anything you can get away with.
Terence Trent D'Arby

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.
Frank Zappa

Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth.
Pablo Picasso

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

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after one grows up.
Pablo Picasso

Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them.
Flannery O'Connor

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

I choose a block of marble and chop off everything I don't need.
François-Auguste Rodin

I didn't like the play. But I saw it under unfavorable circumstances -- the curtains were up.
Groucho Marx

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

I don't know anything about music. In my line you don't have to.
Elvis Presley

I live for books.
Thomas Jefferson

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

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

If there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, it must fire in the last.
Anton Chekhov

Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.
Joseph Conrad

In a painting I want to say something comforting.
Vincent van Gogh

It is not necessary for the public to know whether I am joking or whether I am serious, just as it is not necessary for me to know it myself.
Salvador Dalí

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

Learning music by reading about it is like making love by mail.
Luciano Pavarotti

Let's have some new clichés.
Samuel Goldwyn

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

Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.
Jorge Luis Borges

No sane man will dance.
Cicero

Picasso is a communist. Neither am I.
Salvador Dalí

Some editors are failed writers, but then, so are most writers.
T. S. Eliot

The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy

The writer, making every effort to appear innocent and noble, takes his revenge with the pen; while the murderer, less hypocrtical, takes it with the sword.
Christopher Spranger

There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.
George Bernard Shaw

There is no intellectual exercise which is not ultimately useless.
Jorge Luis Borges

There's many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.
Flannery O'Connor

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

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

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

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