“Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.”

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.

On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

I’m homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.

I don’t want to disappear.

It’s a true image, born of a false spectacle.

Erotic play discloses a nameless world which is revealed by the nocturnal language of lovers. Such language is not written down. It is whispered into the ear at night in a hoarse voice. At dawn it is forgotten.

To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

I could not take lightly the idea that people made love without me.

Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

It’s the hour when night breaks away from the day, my dove, let me go.

Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

To a mind like mine, restless, and observant of everything that was passing, it is easy to suppose that religion was the subject to which it would be directed; although this subject principally occupied my thoughts, there was nothing that I saw or heard of to which my attention was not directed.

Open your mind and let the pictures out

Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can’t mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind, any more than a smallpox virus has.

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

The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Science is unpoetic only to minds jaundiced with sentiment and romanticism, the great masters of the past boasted all they could of it and found it magical.

Volumes are now written and spoken upon the effect of the mind upon the body. Much of it is true. But I wish a little more was thought of the effect of the body on the mind.