What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

Finer than any sand are dusts of gold that gleam, Vague starpoints, in the mystic iris of their eyes.

Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.

We love women in proportion to their degree of strangeness to us.

There is no such thing as a long piece of work, except one that you dare not start.

France at the dinner table in faraway places; but here, among ourselves, in the family, let us face the facts: France is not poetic; to tell the truth, she even feels a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.

Artist should look at the reality and brutality of modern life in all its color, nature with all its imperfections - that should be the challenge to the modern painter not the didactic idealization of the past. The new generation should forge a new path.