“A book is always an emergence above everyday life. A book is expressed life and thus is an addition to life.”

Dreaming by the river, I dedicated my imagination to water, to clear, green water, the water that makes the meadows green.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

The dream remains overloaded with the badly lived passions of daytime life. Solitude in the nocturnal dream is always a hostility. It is strange. It isn’t really our solitude.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech… One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

To feel most beautifully alive means to be reading something beautiful.

The only possible proof of the existence of water, the most convincing and the most intimately true proof, is thirst.

Man is an imagining being.

For a knowledge of intimacy, localization in the spaces of our intimacy is more urgent than determination of dates.

Through imagination, thanks to the subtleties of the irreality function, we re-enter the world of confidence, the world of the confident being, which is the proper world for reverie.

A house that has been experienced is not an inert box. Inhabited space transcends geometrical space.

Our house is our corner of the world.

The reflected world is the conquest of calm.

Ideas are invented only as correctives to the past. Through repeated rectification of this kind one may hope to disengage an idea that is valid.

When the image is new, the world is new.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

Our whole childhood remains to be reimagined. In reimagining it, we have the possibility of recovering it in the very life of our reveries as a solitary child.

It still has these damn four things in it. Anything else is just unnecessary additions to make it smell good or color it blue when it goes down the toilet.

And in addition to this our country was founded on what should have been a great, true principle – the freedom, equality, and rights of each individual. Huh! And what has come of that start?

In addition to consecrating its systems and allowing the imposition of these systems on our people through force.

In addition to the pleasure of having the piece, there is a deep and abiding pleasure for me assembling something in my head

I do believe in [Robert] Bresson’s method of creation through omission, not through addition.

In addition to needed gun control reforms, America urgently needs a stronger protest movement dedicated to reducing the glorification of violence in our culture – in music, film, television, video games, and even the Internet.

In addition to a stronger focus on better training for law enforcement, America urgently needs programs to provide jobs and educational opportunities in economically depressed communities.

Living is like working out a long addition sum, and if you make a mistake in the first two totals you will never find the right answer. It means involving oneself in a complicated chain of circumstances.