Quotes

I write emotional algebra.

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky.

My ideas usually come not at the desk writing but in the midst of living.

We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds.

Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous.

Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, or a new country.

On personal power: I will not be a tourist in the world of images, just watching images passing by which I cannot live in, make love to, possess as permanent source of joy and ecstasy.

On mothering: I know why families were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.

On experience: The wisdom of those who have lived longer than I, though I never recognize it at the moment, is afterwards nearly always justified.

On truth: There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of us acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

On art: The artist not there to be at one with the world, he is there to transform it.

On imagination: Imagination is the source of all my unhappiness as well as of my pleasures.

[on the film, "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser"] The story of Kaspar is more fascinating than the story of Jesus Christ.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.

When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with.