Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.
True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.
Childhood knows what it wants - to leave childhood behind.
The poet is at the disposal of the night. His role is humble, he must clean house and await its due visitation.
The artist must know how far to go too far.
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
I'm not willing just to be tolerated. That wounds my love of love and of liberty.
If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.
The world owes its enchantment to these curious creatures and their fancies; but its multiple complicity rejects them. Thistledown spirits, tragic, heartrending in their evanescence, they must go blowing headlong to perdition.
History is a combination of reality and lies. The reality of History becomes a lie. The unreality of the fable becomes the truth.
There are poets and there are grownups.
A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.
The runner stopped dead, lost his balance, froze in one of those violent attitudes in which the photographers petrify living reality.
Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before sending back images.
The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
One sits down first; one thinks afterwards.
Good music resembles something. It resembles the composer.
Lack of manners is the sign of a hero.
The art of genius is knowing how far out is too far.
How our old friend [Michelangelo] of the Sistine would have loved to photograph his workers, perched on the fragile planks. Dali was right to say Leonardo only worked from photographs.
Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.
He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world.
What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end.
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