“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
– Illustrated London News, May 5, 1928
“Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.”
– “The Suicide of Thought,” Orthodoxy
“The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.”
– “The Progressive,” George Bernard Shaw
“The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.”
– “On the Wit of Whistler,” Heretics
“Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.”
– Illustrated London News, Nov. 25, 1905
“The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.”
– Illustrated London News, Sept. 18, 1909
“By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.”
– “On Detective Novels,” Generally Speaking
“And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.”
– “The Great Dickens Characters,” Charles Dickens
“The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.”
– Daily News, April 22, 1905