The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
Life is a horizontal fall.
Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?
You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.
I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?
The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.
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.
Silence moves faster when it's going backward.
Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness.
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
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.
Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
