The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

As soon as one knows one is going to die, childhood is over.... So one can be grown up at seven. Then, I believe most human beings forget what they have understood, recover another sort of childhood that can last all their lives. It is not a true childhood but a kind of forgetting. Desires and anxieties are there, preventing you from having access to the essential truth.

To become conscious of what is horrifying and to laugh at it is to become master of that which is horrifying

Every message of despair is the statement of a situation from which everybody must freely try to find a way out.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

People always try to find base motives behind every good action. We are afraid of pure goodness and of pure evil.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.