1. "A film is a petrifying fountain of thought. A film revives lifeless deeds. A film permits one to give the appearance of reality to that which is unreal."
2. ”Allow the power of the soul to grow as flagrant as the power of sex.”
3. "An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."
4. ”Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”
5. “Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”
6. “A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”
7. ”Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself.”
8. ”Beauty is always the result of an accident. Of a violent lapse between acquired habits and those yet to be acquired. It baffles and disgusts. It may even horrify. Once the new habit has been acquired, the accident ceases to be an accident. It becomes classical and loses its shock value. A work, therefore, is never perceived. It is received. If I am not mistaken, this was a remark made by Eugene Delacroix: "One is never perceived, one is received." It is a maxim frequently repeated by Matisse. Those who actually saw the accident hasten away, overwhelmed, unable to describe it. Those who did not see it are left to bear witness. This opportunity to make themselves seem important pro-vides the medium through which they express their stupidity The accident remains in the road, bloodied, petrified, awful in its solitude, a prey to gossip and police reports.”
9. ”Compromise yourself. Obscure your own trail.”
10. ”Consider metaphysics as an extension of the physical.”
11. “Do not close the circle. Leave it open. Descartes closes the circle. Pascal leaves it open. Rousseau's triumph over the encyclopedists is to have left his circle open when they closed theirs.”
12. ”Do not confuse progressive science with intuitive science, the only one that counts.”
13. ”Find first, seek later.”
14. ”Hate only hatred.”
15. ”He who is affected by an insult is infected by it.”
16. "I am a lie who always speaks the truth."
17. “I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?”
18. “I feel that there is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.”
19. ”Journalists know this, or at least sense it. The inaccuracies of the press, and the banner headlines by which they are trumpeted, are soothing draughts to this thirst for the unreal. Sadly, no authority presides in this case over the model's metamorphosis into a work of art. But it is this bland metamorphosis that demonstrates the need for myth. Accuracy is vexing to a crowd of would-be fantasizers. Hasn't our age coined the term "escapism," when in fact the only way to escape oneself is to allow oneself to be invaded?”
20. ”Know that your work speaks only to those on the same wavelength as you.”
21. "Life is a horizontal fall."
22. “Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.”
23. "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."
24. “Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.”
25. "Murderers have been known to find that young girls give them more trouble than anybody else."
26. "Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity."
27. “Never do what a specialist can do better. Discover your own specialty. Do not despair if your specialty appears to be more delicate, a lesser thing. Make up in finesse what you lose in force.”
28. "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."
29. ”Poetry, being elegance itself, cannot hope to achieve visibility. In that case, you ask me, of what use is it? Of no use. Who will see it? No one. Which does not prevent it from being an outrage to modesty, though its exhibitionism is squandered on the blind. It is enough for poetry to express a personal ethic, which can then break away in the form of a work. It insists on living its own life. It becomes the pretext for a thousand misunderstandings that go by the name of glory.”
30. “Silence moves faster when it's going backward.”
31. "Style is a simple way of saying complicated things."
32. “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.”
33. ”Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far.”
34. "Take care not to shave your antennae of a morning.”
35. "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."
36. “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.”
37. "The extreme limit of wisdom --that's what the public calls madness."
38. “The greatest masterpiece of literature is only a dictionary out of order.”
39. ”The inaccuracy of such gossip and such reports is not exclusively the result of distraction. It has more solid roots. It is closely related to the genesis of myth. Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal (…). unnable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort, the trifling feeling of escape experienced at a masked ball. He distances himself from that which he feels and sees. He invents. He transfigures. He mythifies. He creates. He fancies himself an artist. He imitates, in his small way, the painters he claims are mad.”
40. “The poet doesn't invent. He listens.”
41. ”The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”
42. "The true tomb of the dead is the heart of the living."
43. “The worst fate of a poet is to be admired without being understood.”
44. "True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing."
45. "We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?"
46. "We shelter an angel within us. We must be the guardians of that angel."
47. "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."
48. "What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."
49. "When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."
