When van Gogh paints sunflowers, he reveals, or achieves, the vivid relation between himself, as man, and the sunflower, as sunflower, at that quick moment of time. His painting does not represent the sunflower itself. We shall never know what the sunflower itself is. And the camera will visualize the sunflower far more perfectly than van Gogh can.

We don't exist unless we are deeply and sensually in touch with that which can be touched but not known.

A museum is not a first-hand contact: it is an illustrated lecture. And what one wants is the actual vital touch.

The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? Because it is so incapable of the absolute.

Without secrecy there would be no pornography. But secrecy and modesty are two utterly different things.

If we had reverence for our life, our life would take at once religious form. But as it is, in our filthy irreverence, it remains a disgusting slough, where each one of us goes so thoroughly disguised in dirt that we are all alike and indistinguishab

And if tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.