Great Throughts Treasury

"If you wait for the perfect moment when all is safe and assured, it may never arrive Mountains will not be climbed, races won, or lasting happiness achieved."

"Old age isn't so bad when you consider the alternative."

"It all boils down to instinct, good or bad. Artistic creation must be spontaneous. It comes from the heart; it has to pass through the brain; and still one needs the guts, and good old, indispensable technique, to bring it to the light of day. That, at least, is how I see the process, not that I have ever been able to pin it down very exactly in my own case. You hear a voice inside. You obey it, and produce whatever it told you to produce; and then you wait and see. And oh! The trouble you're in for."

"A comfortable old age is the reward of a well-spent youth. Instead of its bringing sad and melancholy prospects of decay, it would give us hopes of eternal youth in a better world."

"The crime of loving is forgetting."

"An artist carries on throughout his life a mysterious, uninterrupted conversation with his public."

"Those whose approval you seek most give you the least."

"You don't stop laughing because you grow older. You grow older because you stop laughing."

"Inspiration comes unawares, from unaccountable sources that have nothing to do with planning or intelligence. Let it cool ever so slightly, and you are left, pen or brush in hand, with no inspiration at all. Gifted people need not, therefore, make a song and dance about being or supposing themselves superior. They simply happened to be born with that fortunate, subconscious equipment of theirs, and the mystery exists independently of intelligence or ambition."