“The public wants work which flatters its illusions.”

It’s a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.

Pleasure is found first in anticipation, later in memory.

One’s existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

Life is so horrible that one can only bear it by avoiding it. And that can be done by living in the world of art.

What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times. The ordinary person today lives better than a king did a century ago but is ungrateful!

Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

After a person dies, there is always something like a feeling of stupefaction, so difficult is it to comprehend this unexpected advent of nothingness and to resign oneself to believing it.

One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

Maybe I expected you to be something that you were just never going to be.

I think that in life, being is nothing but an illusion. If we acknowledge that and accept the fact that we are in between states, that we are moving, and this movement is the nature of our lives

Illusions must be out to death. That is the cruelty of growing up.

If my former self and my current self met for coffee, they’d get along OK, but they’d both probably walk out of the Starbucks shaking their heads and saying to themselves, “That guy is kinda delusional.”

The illusion which exalts us is dearer to us than ten thousand truths.

Better the illusions that exalt us than ten thousand truths.

Unconditional love is an illogical notion, but such a great and powerful one.

Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf, who’s afraid of living life without false illusions.