“I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.

Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.

The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.

The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.

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.

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

Poetry is a religion with no hope.

Art is science in the flesh.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

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.

We have never heard the devil’s side of the story, God wrote all the book.

How nice – to feel nothing, and still get full credit for being alive.

Raised voices lower esteem. Hot tempers cool friendships. Loose tongues stretch truth. Swelled heads shrink influence. Sharp words dull respect.

The key to happiness doesn’t lay in numbers in a bank account but in the way we make others feel and the way they make us feel.

Racism is a grown-up disease, and we should stop using our kids to spread it.

Everyone has a common, yet unique, responsibility to the future: to make the most of today.

Is death the last sleep? No, it is the last and final awakening.

Credit is like a looking-glass, which when once sullied by a breath, may be wiped clear again; but if once cracked can never be repaired.