Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a will to renewal. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of crises - of rupture, repudiation and resistance. When there is no crisis, there is stagnation, petrifaction and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.

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.

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

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I'd be a politician.

I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.