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.

That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide.

Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.

I've always been suspicious of collective truths.

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

A really conscientious doctor ought to die with his patient. The captain goes down with his ship.

An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any system of government, an established form of expression is also a form of oppression. The avant-garde man is the opponent of an existing system.