“One can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.”

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.