“Art is science made clear.”
“Life is a horizontal fall.”
“Tact is knowing how far to go too far.”
“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.”
“Poetry is indispensable --if I only knew what for.”
“Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.”
“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 Louver is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.”
“Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far.”
“The extreme limit of wisdom --that's what the public calls madness.”
“The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.”
“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.”
“The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.”
“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.”
“Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.”
“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.”