Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to astonish us.

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

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

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

I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

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