What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.
I feel myself inhabited by a force or being – very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?
I am happy to exhibit, but not to put myself on exhibition.
It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.
There are poets and there are grownups.
Beauty cannot be recognized with a cursory glance.
Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
If a poet has a dream, it is not of becoming famous, but of being believed.
Poetry is indispensable – if I only knew what for.
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.