To write a poem is like trying to catch a lizard without its tail falling off.
But I love to feel events overlapping each other, crawling over one another like wet crabs in a basket.
They flower spontaneously out of the demands of our natures – and the best of them lead us not only outward in space, but inward as well.
It’s unthinkable not to love -you’d have a severe nervous breakdown. Or you’d have to be Philip Larkin.
No one can go on being a rebel too long without turning into an autocrat.
Shyness has laws you can only give yourself; tragically to those who least understand.
The cocktail party – as the name itself indicates – was originally invented by dogs. They are simply bottom-sniffings raised to the rank of formal ceremonies.
It is the duty of every patriot to hate his country creatively.
Comedians are the nearest to suicide.
Lovers can find nothing to say to each other that has not been said and unsaid a thousand times over. Kisses were invented to translate such nothings into wounds.
Poetry is what happens when an anxiety meets a technique.
A taste older than meat, older than wine. A taste as old as cold water.
I see artists as a great battalion moving through paint, words, music towards cosmological interpretation.
Every man is made of clay and diamond, and no woman can nourish both.
The sense of truth no matter how subjective is necessary for the experience of beauty.
Of women, the most we can say, not being Frenchmen, is that they are burrowing animals.
All artists today are expected to cultivate a little fashionable unhappiness.
Truth is what most contradicts itself.
Brazil is bigger than Europe, wilder than Africa, and weirder than Baffin Land.
All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.