"There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul."

"The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up."

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

"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."

"One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends."

"One must be a living man and a posthumous artist."

"Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying."

"The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed."

"I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?"

"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie."

"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."

"True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing."

"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."

"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."

"The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them."

"There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard."

"Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious."

"Silence moves faster when it's going backward."

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

"The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood."

"The day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying."

"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."

"I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul."

"Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself."

"The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness."

"If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas."

"After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter."

"In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator."

"The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends."

"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."

"Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far."

"Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live."

"What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."

"Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."

"Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture."

"Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail."

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

"Style is a simple way of saying complicated things."

"You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."

"Art is not a pastime but a priesthood."

"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death."

"Life is a horizontal fall."

"Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for."

"If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it."

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

"I am a lie who always speaks the truth."

"All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it."

"I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another."

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

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