I'm sorry for people who make a great to-do about the transitory nature of things and get lost in meditations on earthly nothingness. Surely we are here precisely so as to turn what passes into something that endures; but this is only possible if you can appreciate both.

Now if he is not inclined to learn from more highly skilled contemporary or earlier artists what he himself lacks in order to be a true artist, he will lag behind his own potential because of a wrong-headed idea that he is safeguarding his own originality; for we own not just what we are born with, but also what we can acquire, and this is what we are.

Shakespeare is dangerous reading for talents in the process of formation: he forces them to reproduce him, and they imagine they are producing themselves.

Hindus in the desert vow never to eat fish.

There is no way of more surely avoiding the world than by art, and it is by art that you form the surest link with it.