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

There is no original truth, only original error.

Childhood lasts all through life.

We must listen to poets.

A book is a human fact; a great book like Seraphita gathers together numerous psychological elements. These elements become coherent through a sort of psychological beauty. It does the reader a service.

The spoken reverie of substances calls matter to birth, to life, to spirituality.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

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.

The stronger person is not the one making the most noise but the one who can quietly direct the conversation toward defining and solving problems.

When I write something, I want the best director to direct it. And that’s not going to be me.

I would like to direct.

It is the unqualified result of all my experience with the sick that, second only to their need of fresh air, is their need of light; that, after a close room, what hurts them most is a dark room and that it is not only light but direct sunlight they want.

Whoever the master is whom you prefer, this must only be a directive for you. Otherwise you will never be anything but an imitator.

The degradation of our environment is undeniably a direct result of our lack of regard, lack of accountability, and lack of responsibility.

What we do to animals directly impacts everything, because we are all connected. It disrupts the food chain, it funds terrorism (ivory), it changes our climate, our oceans, it starts wars.

It’s not easy to strap yourself down to a desk and bash on a keyboard when you know you can direct lots of films, because directing films is fun and interactive and gregarious. Writing isn’t.