“Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.”

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

Continue reading Proust. His magnificent intelligence is particularly fond of describing stupidity. Which is ultimately exhausting.

Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship.

When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.

Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don’t like – then cultivate it. That’s the only part of your work that’s individual and worth keeping.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it’s a miracle that we don’t dissolve in our baths.

I feel myself inhabited by a force or being — very little known to me. It gives the orders; I follow.

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel.

A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.

Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.

Youth can only assert itself through the conviction that its ventures surpass all others and resemble nothing.

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.

Science, not religion, has taught me my most useful values, among them intellectual honesty. It is better to go without answers than to accept those that merely resolve puzzlement.

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

Take me or leave me; or, as is the usual order of things, both.

I want to be the first guy to help people accept everybody for who they are. I’m talking about colors, religions, sex, everybody. My music is for everybody, it’s not just for one kind of group.

I want to be the first guy to help people accept everybody for who they are. I’m talking about colors, religions, sex, everybody. My music is for everybody, it’s not just for one kind of group.

I want to be the first guy to help people accept everybody for who they are. I’m talking about colors, religions, sex, everybody. My music is for everybody, it’s not just for one kind of group.

Now is the accepted time, not tomorrow, not some more convenient season. It is today that our best work can be done.