True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.
Perhaps I know to what extent I can go too far.
I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job. The rest is literature.
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.
The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.
There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.
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.
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Catastrophe, riots, factories blowing up, armies in flight, flood – the ear can detect a whole apocalypse in the starry night of the human body.
I am burning myself up and will always do so.
The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.
My only politics have been friendship.
The speed of a runaway horse counts for nothing.
It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.