Myth and fairy-story must, as all art, reflect and contain in solution elements of moral and religious truth (or error), but not explicit, not in the known form of the primary ‚real‘ world.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

As an artist your first loyalty is to your art. Unless this is the case, you’re going to be a second-rate artist.

I’ve never been able to witness the birth of an idea. It seems as if one second, there’s nothing particularly going on, and the next second, something is there. It’s coming up out of my unconscious, up from places that I don’t even know where they are.

Some men see things as they are, and say why. I dream of things that never were, and say why not.

Science fiction, to me, has not only things that wouldn’t happen, but other planets.

I was so rude when I was a little girl.

What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.

The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

One of the things you do when you make a piece of art is you try to make the world you’d rather be in.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Old age is just a record of one’s whole life.

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.

Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.

Painting, I think it’s like jazz.

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest.

If I err in belief that the souls of men are immortal, I gladly err, nor do I wish this error which gives me pleasure to be wrested from me while I live.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures.

A man may imagine things that are false, but he can only understand things that are true, for if the things be false, the apprehension of them is not understanding.

Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.

It is true we have won all our wars, but we have paid for them. We don’t want victories anymore.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

When we look back on all the perils through which we have passed and at the mighty foes that we have laid low and all the dark and deadly designs that we have frustrated, why should we fear for our future? We have come safely through the worst.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

Dancing is a perpendicular expression of a horizontal desire.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Experience is the child of thought, and thought is the child of action.

No memory of having starred atones for later disregard, or keeps the end from being hard.

If it’s all instruction, you get annoyed with it and bored, and you stop reading. If it’s all entertainment, you read it quite quickly, your heart going pitty-pat, pitty-pat. But when you finish, that’s it. You’re not going to think about it much afterward, apart from the odd nightmare. You’re not going to read that book again.

When you come to see a picture of mine, I want you to know that I’m not going to do anything that will make you uncomfortable. I want you to know that you won’t be disappointed in me.

The world is indebted for all triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

Many a trip continues long after movement in time and space have ceased.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Death most resembles a prophet who is without honor in his own land or a poet who is a stranger among his people.

No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.

Science does not know its debt to imagination.

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

Life is the childhood of our immortality.

For time is the longest distance between two places.

When all is said and done, more is said than done.

I think a poet is anybody who wouldn’t call himself a poet.

A minute of thought is greater than an hour of talk.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

We are time’s subjects, and time bids be gone.

Everyone now knows how to find the meaning of life within himself. But mankind wasn’t always so lucky. Less than a century ago, men and women did not have easy access to the puzzle boxes within them.

I restore myself when I’m alone.

The essence of Richard Nixon is loneliness.

There is so much that people take for granted.

I suppose for me as an artist it wasn’t always just about expressing my work; I really wanted, more than anything else, to contribute in some way to the culture that I was living in. It just seemed like a challenge to move it a little bit towards the way I thought it might be interesting to go.

To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science.

Sometimes one pays most for the things one gets for nothing.

The human race is governed by its imagination.

In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.