Love Among The Artists

Even the youngest of us may be wrong sometimes.

I hate singers, a miserable crew who think that music exists only in their own throats.

Composers are not human; They can live on diminished sevenths, and be contented with a pianoforte for a wife, and a string quartet for a family.

The public want actresses, because they think all actresses bad. They don't want music or poetry because they know that both are good. So actors and actresses thrive and poets and composers starve.

If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling. Corrupt successes, disgraceful failures, or sheeplike vegetation are all it has to offer. I prefer Art, which gives me a sixth sense of beauty, with self-respect: perhaps also an immortal reputation in return for honest endeavour in a labour of love.

Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.

The way to deal with worldly people is to frighten them by repeating their scandalous whisperings aloud.

A man's own self is the last person to believe in him, and is harder to cheat than the rest of the world.

Perhaps woman's art is of woman's life a thing apart, 'tis man's whole existence; just as love is said to be the reverse — though it isn't.

There are some men who are considered quite ugly, but who are more remarkable than pretty people. You often see that in artists.

All very fine, Mary; but my old-fashioned common sense is better than your clever modern nonsense.