Those who live, live off the dead.
Admittedly or not, conscious or unconscious, the poetic state, a transcendent experience of life, is what the public is fundamentally seeking through love, crime, drugs, war, or insurrection.
Enough, I shall be understood in ten years by people who will be doing what you do today. Then my geysers will be known, my ice floes will be seen, the secret of adulterating my poisons will have been learned, the games of my soul will be revealed.
I would like to write a Book which would drive men mad, which would be like an open door leading them where they would never have consented to go, in short, a door that opens onto reality.
If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.
Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.
But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.
I am stigmatized by a living death in which real death holds no terrors for me.
I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.
All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.
In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.
Destroy yourselves, you who are desperate, and you who are tortured in body and soul, abandon all hope. There is no more solace for you in this world. The world lives off your rotting flesh.
I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.
I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.
With society and its public, there is no longer any other language than that of bombs, barricades, and all that follows.
Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.
A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome.
I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.
In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.
Without sarcasm I sink into chaos.
I am a man by virtue of my hands and my feet, my belly, my heart of meat, my stomach whose knots reunite me to the putrefaction of life.