“I am adding another language to the spoken language, and I am trying to restore to the language of speech its old magic, its essential spellbinding power, for its mysterious possibilities have been forgotten.”

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

I do not work within the confines of any realm. I work in the unique moment of duration.

Leave the caves of being. Come. The mind breathes outside the mind. The time has come to abandon your lodgings. Surrender to the Universal Thought. The Marvelous is at the root of the mind.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

To break through language in order to touch life is to create or re-create the theater.

So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses.

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again.

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.

You are quite unnecessary, young man!

I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

I do not like detached creation. Neither can I conceive of the mind as detached from itself. Each of my works, each diagram of myself, each glacial flowering of my inmost soul dribbles over me.

I abandon myself to the fever of dreams, in search for new laws.

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

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

I feel it is unnatural and immoral to try to teach science to children in a foreign language They will know facts, but they will miss the spirit.

Books are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two ‘languages.’ It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves.

As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.

I liked different etymologies, different slang that came out in different eras. Different languages. Different dialects.

We must teach science in the mother tongue. Otherwise, science will become a highbrow activity.

The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything!

The development of language is part of the development of the personality, for words are the natural means of expressing thoughts and establishing understanding between people.

The child, merely by going on with his life, learns to speak the language belonging to his race. It is like a mental chemistry that takes place in the child.