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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.

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Criticism talks a good deal of nonsense, but even its nonsense is a useful force. It keeps the question of art before the world, insists upon its impo...more

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We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it.

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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

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She’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She’s the self-made girl!(…)Well, to begin with, the self-made girl’s a new feature. ...more

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What we often take to be the new is simply the old under some novel form.

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Before he went away, he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible d...more

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Let us be vulgar and have some fun, let us invite the President.

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..if I dont do something on the grand scale, it is that my genius is altogether imitative, and that I have nor recently encountered any very striking ...more

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Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.

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We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

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Make (the reader) think the evil, make him think it for himself, and you are released from weak specifications. My values are positively all blanks, s...more

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She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.