...You have to pass an exam, and the jobs that you get are either to shine shoes, or to herd cows, or to tend pigs. Thank God, I don't want any of that! Damn it! And besides that they smack you for a reward; they call you an animal and it's not true, a little kid, etc.. Oh! Damn Damn Damn Damn Damn!

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.

True life is elsewhere

Whose hearts must I break? What lies must I maintain? - Through whose blood am I to wade ?

The Poet makes himself a seer through a long, vast and painstaking derangement of all the senses

Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.