The poetic image […] is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of any image, the distant past resounds with echoes.

Very often, I confess, the teller of dreams bores me. His dream could perhaps interest me if it were frankly worked on. But to hear a glorious tale of his insanity! I have not yet clarified, psychoanalytically, this boredom during the recital of other people's dreams. Perhaps I have retained the stiffness of a rationalist. I do not follow the tale of justified incoherence docilely. I always suspect that part of the stupidities being recounted are invented.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

To go upstairs in the word house is to withdraw step by step; while to go down to the cellar is to dream.

One doesn't read poetry while thinking of other things.

Why should the actions of the imagination not be as real as those of perception?