For a long time I found the celebrities of modern painting and poetry ridiculous. I loved absurd pictures, fanlights, stage scenery, mountebanks backcloths, inn-signs, cheap colored prints; unfashionable literature, church Latin, pornographic books badly spelt, grandmothers novels, fairy stories, little books for children, old operas, empty refrains, simple rhythms.

He would say, "How funny it will all seem, all you've gone through, when I'm not here anymore, when you no longer feel my arms around your shoulders, nor my heart beneath you, nor this mouth on your eyes, because I will have to go away some day, far away..." And in that instant I could feel myself with him gone, dizzy with fear, sinking down into the most horrible blackness: into death.

But the problem is to make the soul into a monster

True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.

I'm intact, and I don't give a damn.

I wrote silences; nights; I recorded the unnameable.

What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.