“The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.”

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot — the sail he has seen.

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.

Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.

Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.

Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run.

The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.

On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

I’m homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. It’s only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.

War: that mad game the world so loves to play.

If being crazy means living life as if it matters, then I don’t mind being completely insane.

In order to attain the impossible, one must attempt the absurd.

It’s probably the worst feeling in the world, when you’re deeply and madly in love with a woman and you know she’s not feeling you the same way, and you don’t know why.

The process of making a movie is what I love. I thrive on that. It’s an exciting miracle, a mad adventure. I love being part of it.

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

The mere possession of a gun is, in itself, an urge to kill, not only by design, but by accident, by madness, by fright, by bravado.