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

All knowledge is in response to a question. If there were no question, there would be no scientific knowledge. Nothing proceeds from itself.

The metaphor is – an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

For in the end, the irreality function functions as well in the face of man as in the face of the cosmos. What would we know of others if we did not imagine things?

Every corner in a house, every angle in a room, every inch of secluded space in which we like to hide, or withdraw into ourselves, is a symbol of solitude for the imagination; that is to say, it is the germ of a room, or of a house.

By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.

All the senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie. Poetic reverie listens to this polyphony of the senses, and the poetic consciousness must record it.

There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

Childhood knows unhappiness through men. In solitude, it can relax its aches. When the human world leaves him in peace, the child feels like the son of the cosmos.

A clear conscience is, for me, an occupied conscience-never empty-the conscience of a man at work until his last breath.

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child’s world and thus a world event.

Rilke wrote: ‘These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

Words are clamor-filled shells. There’s many a story in the miniature of a single word!

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.

At this level, only images connect. And here, story becomes symbol; symbol is myth. And myth is truth.

I’m an angry person, angrier than most people would imagine, I get flashes of anger.

And then there are encouragements to use heterosexual pornography or heterosexual images to encourage heterosexual attraction.

The image and the costs of a Berlin-like wall or a Great Wall of China is something that the American people have not accepted to date.

The image is a great reminder how we create our world through interpretations made up of language and symbols.

The image foreigners have of French cuisine is fattening and very fancy food. But it’s not true – French food isn’t just rich. The word “healthy” doesn’t exist in French.

After a while I started to think of that as an image of something that went a lot deeper than the dead dog, which is you can’t bring back anything to life.

I’ve never tried to manipulate my image.