“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.”

Squander your riches far from this unfeeling body to which no season, either spiritual or sensual, makes any difference.

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.

I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth, however uncertain, my whole reason for living.

Tragedy on the stage is no longer enough for me, I shall bring it into my own life.

The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate.

Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination.

There is nothing like an insane asylum for gently incubating death.

I call for actors burning at the stakes, laughing at the flames.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself.

If our life lacks a constant magic it is because we choose to observe our acts and lose ourselves in consideration of their imagined form and meaning, instead of being impelled by their force.

In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.

In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it.

Before our eyes is fought a battle of symbols, for there can be theatre only from the moment when the impossible really begins and when the poetry that occurs on the stage sustains and superheats the realized symbols.

Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships.

I built a kingdom out of heartache and it is glorious.

You were built to love.

Every man’s happiness is built on the unhappi-ness of another.

Deos fortioribus adesse. The gods support those who are stronger.

Man is made of ordinary things, and habit is his nurse.

I’m not a genetically superior person. I built my body.

But I learned that there’s a certain character that can be built from embarrassing yourself endlessly. If you can sit happy with embarrassment, there’s not much else that can really get to ya.

Why go to a church to worship God? A church is man made. God never said, “And let there be aluminum siding.” Climbing a tree to talk to God sounds like a better idea since only God can make a tree. And if that tree’s on a golf course, all the better.