“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.”

The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work – that’s what makes you unique.

The only way to kill death is through photography.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like – then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.

I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

If you have a strong belief in yourself, in what you are doing and what you want to do, no adversity is too difficult to overcome.

Every intelligent individual wants to know what makes him tick, and yet is at once fascinated and frustrated by the fact that oneself is the most difficult of all things to know.

The difficulty is not so great to die for a friend as to find a friend worth dying for.

It is difficult to bring people to goodness with lessons, but it is easy to do so by example.

It is easy to hate and it is difficult to love.

Difficult times don’t come your way just so you can survive them; God uses these times in your life to form and refine you.

Never trust the advice of a man in difficulties.

A difficult game but a very important point. Keep on fighting until the end.