“Art is science made clear.”
“Life is a horizontal fall.”
“I am a lie who always speaks the truth.”
“A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”
“It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.”
“One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.”
“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”
“I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.”
“The extreme limit of wisdom --that's what the public calls madness.”
“If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.”
“An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.”
“We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?”
“When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.”
“True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.”
“If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.”
“There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.”
“Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.”
“All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.”
“A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.”
“Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.”
“One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.”
“Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.”
“Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.”
“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”
“If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.”
“What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model. With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.”
“Tact is knowing how far to go too far.”
“Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.”
“Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.”
“The Louver is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.”