To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow.

To me the world seems grotesque, absurd, ridiculous, painful.

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

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

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

People who don't read are brutes. It is better to write than to make war, isn't it?

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.