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

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 know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him.

We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter.

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.

We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.