I will try to account for the degree of my aesthetic emotion. That, I conceive, is the function of the critic.

The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.

It is not by his mixing and choosing, but by the shapes of his colors, and the combination of those shapes, that we recognize the colorist. Color becomes significant only when it becomes form.

Art and religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstacy.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.

Comfort came in with the middle classes.

Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

It would follow that 'significant form' was form behind which we catch a sense of ultimate reality.

A consistent soul believes in destiny, a capricious one in chance.

On day one, the Church wasn't for church people because there weren't any church people.

Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.

Might not most men be as well named boys grown old.

There has got to be more to life than being a really, really, ridiculously good actor.

I get the worst compliments all the time. 'Oh you're Asian? I love orange chicken.'

You can't talk your way out of a situation you acted you way into.

We arrogantly assume that the nervous system doesn't really need to be coaxed into romance. That romance comes from some other place.

I think I write or publish as much as I do because I can bear being without a book to work on.

Animals are like humans, only more openly carnal and sexual, more openly and therefore more disarmingly absurd.