“However spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary.”

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

We are free when our actions emanate from our total personality, when they express it, when they resemble it in the indefinable way a work of art sometimes does the artist.

When it is said that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

Intelligence is characterized by a natural incomprehension of life.

A situation is always comic if it participates simultaneously in two series of events which are absolutely independent of each other, and if it can be interpreted in two quite different meanings.

The major task of the twentieth century will be to explore the unconscious, to investigate the subsoil of the mind.

The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the effect was already in the cause.

Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.

Life does not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but by dissociation and division.

To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.

I believe I experience creativity at every moment of my life.

Genius is that which forces the inertia of humanity to learn.

It is the very essence of intelligence to coordinate means with a view to a remote end, and to undertake what it does not feel absolutely sure of carrying out.

Realism is in the work when idealism is in the soul, and it is only through idealism that we resume contact with reality.

I would say act like a man of thought and think like a man of action.

The effect of life in society is to complicate and confuse our existence, making us forget who we really are by causing us to become obsessed with what we are not.

I think being someone in love is so hard to define, so temporary, because retrospectively we often deny the state in which we were in love.

My way of expression is full of complications and mystery because that’s my perception of life.

I have the impression that if he didn’t complicate his life so needlessly, he would die of boredom.

It is no longer possible for lyric poetry to express the immensity of our experience. Life has grown too cumbersome, too complicated. We have acquired values which are best expressed in prose.

Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

Even a graphomaniac is an extremely complicated person.

It feels like I’m starting to come into my own in terms of where I want to go artistically, toward more complicated, interesting characters.