Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

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

Life is a horizontal fall.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.

Jean Grey Girls flirt with the dangerous guy, they don't bring him home... they marry the good guy.

The only dance masters I could have were Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Walt Whitman and Nietzsche.

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

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

The extreme limit of wisdom-- that is what the public calls madness.

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

The extreme limit of wisdom--that is what the public calls madness.

What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist's presence makes itself felt above that of the model. With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul's style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies.

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

The New Women! I could barely recognize them as being of the same sex as myself, their buttocks arrogant in tight jeans, openly inviting, breasts falling free and shameless and feeling no apparent obligation to smile, look pleasant or keep their voices low. And how they live! Just look at them to know how! If a man doesn't bring them to orgasm, they look for another who does. If by mistake they fall pregnant, they abort by vacuum aspiration. If they don't like the food, they push the plate away. If the job doesn't suit them, they hand in their notice. They are satiated by everything, hungry for nothing. They are what I wanted to be; they are what I worked for them to be: and now I see them, I hate them.

The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

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.

Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.

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

Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity.

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.

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

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.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

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

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.

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.

In the end we beat them with Levi 501 jeans. Seventy-two years of Communist indoctrination and propaganda was drowned out by a three-ounce Sony Walkman. A huge totalitarian system has been brought to its knees because nobody wants to wear Bulgarian shoes. Now they're lunch, and we're number one on the planet.

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

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

I have often said that I wish I had invented blue jeans: the most spectacular, the most practical, the most relaxed and nonchalant. They have expression, modesty, sex appeal, simplicity -- all I hope for in my clothes.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

I am a lie who always speaks the truth.

A film is a petrified fountain of thought.

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

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

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

Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.

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

Tact is knowing how far to go too far.

Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far.

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, they finish by loading honors on your head.

Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.

I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.

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

Style can make complicated things seems simple, or simple things complicated.

Jean and I blew a ton of savings so we could fly Concorde just to see the curvature of the earth. It's something you don't normally get to see, so I figured out, if you can do it, do it.

It is difficult to live without opium after having known it because it is difficult, after knowing opium, to take earth seriously. And unless one is a saint, it is difficult to live without taking earth seriously.