“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.”

When I write, I disturb. When I show a film, I disturb. When I exhibit my painting, I disturb, and I disturb if I don’t. I have a knack for disturbing.

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

A true photographer is as rare as a true poet or a true painter.

Whatever the world condemns you for, make it your own. It is yourself.

The public is never pleased with what we do, wanting always a copy of what we have done.

The job of the poet (a job which can’t be learned) consists of placing those objects of the visible world which have become invisible due to the glue of habit, in an unusual position which strikes the soul and gives them a tragic force.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?

Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility… It insists on living its own life.

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

I only fear the death of others. For me, true death is that of the people I love.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.

Poetry is a religion with no hope.

Art is science in the flesh.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

Even the silence has music if you care to listen to.

Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another, to care for one another, and cherish one another and seek the greater good of the other.

Even the Moon takes care of you wherever you go, it follows you.

A purpose, an intention, a design, strikes everywhere even the careless, the most stupid thinker.

That we live in a post-truth society today, and that we don’t care, that we have lost empathy. We have stopped caring for each other in a way. We have stopped thinking long-term and sustainable. And that’s something that goes much deeper than just climate crisis deniers.

Do your duty and a little more and the future will take care of itself.

You deserve a good man. Who tells you he cares. Who listens when you speak. Who chooses you above the rest.

I mastered the art of not caring and wow it made me more daring.