“Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.”

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Empirical description involves enslavement to the object by decreeing passivity on the part of the subject.

Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life… Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.

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.

What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata.

Jazz vision for me is seeing my art in musical term. It offers me an visual expressions in an ever-changing musical palette.

And in a repressed society, artists fulfil a sense of harking back to instant gratification, or immediate expression, by doing things that function on the edge of society, or outside of what is conventionally accepted.

I think we have to stop using the expression “alt-right.” It’s ridiculous. It’s racist, fascist, nationalist.

Everything you do counts forever. You are an expression of the whole process of creation; you are a cocreator.

Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It’s because I understand short attention spans.

I prefer to leave the paintings to speak for themselves.

For the trustees to turn away from the entirely reasonable request of the students that a hearing-impaired individual be made president of the college is a very unfortunate expression of insensitivity.