“I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.”

All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.

Thus my life is a flight and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to him.

Israelites, Christians and Muslims profess immortality, but the veneration they render this world proves they believe only in it, since they destine all other worlds, in infinite number, to be its reward or punishment.

Soccer is popular because stupidity is popular.

Happy are the beloved and the lovers and those who can live without love.

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

He consorted with prostitutes and poets and with persons even worse.

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to new abominations, and soon that only bandits and soldiers will be left.

No one is a poet from eight to twelve and from two to six. Whoever is a poet is one always, and continually assaulted by poetry.

Reality is partial to symmetry and slight anachronisms

A poet is a discoverer rather than an inventor.

Many of the characters are fools and they’re always playing tricks on me and treating me badly.

Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.

Let others pride themselves about how many pages they have written; I’d rather boast about the ones I’ve read.

A book is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

I am capable of holding the quote-unquote ‘title’ of leading man. Leading man just means people want to see you and assume that you can hold a film, carry a movie.

I want to be respected as a guy who knows what he’s talking about. And that, to me, holds more weight than anything else.

Hold everybody accountable? Ridiculous!

You can blame the other guy for saying it, or you can look at yourself and say, ‘I must have contributed to this.’

The questions are diamonds you hold in the light.

Nature holds the key to our aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive and even spiritual satisfaction.

When we hold something, anything, in our thought, then somehow coincidence leads us in the direction that we’ve been wishing to lead ourselves.

There are a good many points about which I may be diffident, but when it comes to questions of Truth and intellectual independence, there is no holding me – I can envisage no finer end than to sacrifice oneself for a conviction.