“Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.”

I am an artist. I am here to live out loud.

The word realist means nothing to me, because I would subordinate reality to temperament. Give me what is true and I applaud; but give me what is individual and alive and I applaud even more.

If something’s just, I’ll let myself be hacked to bits for it.

They talked so, with secret hearts, without needing words, talking of other things. They could have suddenly continued their confessions aloud, without ceasing to understand each other.

If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.

In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think only of their own gratification; yet without love there would be no life, and the world would come to an end.

When sometimes, behind his back, they called him a tyrant, he merely smiled and uttered this profound observation: If some day I turn liberal, they will say I have let them down.

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they’ve been taught is wrong!

When truth is buried, it grows. It chokes. It gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.

Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest.

One forges one’s style on the terrible anvil of daily deadlines.

The road to Lourdes is littered with crutches, but not one wooden leg.

If I cannot overwhelm with my quality, I will overwhelm with my quantity.

Respectable people, What bastards!

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

The world’s history is constant, like the laws of nature, and simple, like the souls of men. The same conditions continually produce the same results.

The history of the world is the world’s court of justice.

I speak with the Eternal through the instrument of nature, through the world’s history: I read the soul of the artist in his Apollo.

If you are to judge a man, you must know his secret thoughts, sorrows, and feelings; to know merely the outward events of a man’s life would only serve to make a chronological table-a fool’s notion of history.

Punishment is not prevention. History offers cold comfort to those who think grievance and despair can be subdued by force.

The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history.

If our history can challenge the next wave of musicians to keep moving and changing, to keep spiritually hungry and horny, that’s what it’s all about.