“Love has nothing to do with good reasons.”

The visible world is but man turned inside out that he may be revealed to himself.

I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of an artistic process.

Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

He is the same old sausage, fizzing and sputtering in his own grease.

Don’t underestimate the value of irony-it is extremely valuable.

I don’t care anything about reasons, but I know what I like.

Live as you like best and your character will take care of itself.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

In art economy is always beauty.

If one is strong, one loves the more strongly.

One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense.

You are good for nothing unless you are clever.

The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern . . . this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.

It led rather downward and earthward, into realms of restriction and depression, where the sound of other lives, easier and freer, was heard as from above, and served to deepen the feeling of failure.

Excellence does not require perfection.

I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts – facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.

Nothing that rest on some contradictory basis shall succeed or last in the long run (“ne saurait réussir ou durer, à la longue”, Fr.); all that involve (or imply…) a contradiction is fatally destined, early or late, to disintegrate and disappear.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

There is nothing wrong with being well off as long as money has a social and ethical value and is not the object of one’s own greed.

Reading ‘Legitimation Crisis’ in Tehran is nothing less than a masterpiece of moral and political criticism.

The distinction between right and wrong (“la distinction du bien et du mal”, Fr.), is nothing else than their unyielding (or implacable) opposition.

The undertakings enter unto (“les engagements contractés”, Fr.), nothing assure that we will not break them, possibly (“éventuellement”, Fr.) in another.

We experience boredom, which is nothing elses than the feeling of unease that take hold of us when our spirit is not absorbed by the mirages of life.