To understand what the outside of an aquarium looks like, it's better not to be a fish.

There is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, Islam has hashish, the West has woman.

Every young man's heart is a graveyard in which are inscribed the names of a thousand dead artists but whose only actual denizens are a few mighty, often antagonistic, ghosts.

Youth is a religion from which one always ends up being converted.

The great mystery is not that we should have been thrown down here at random between the profusion of matter and that of the stars; it is that from our very prison we should draw, from our own selves, images powerful enough to deny our own nothingness.

In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it.

If you can't make art, make your life a work of art.