Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

Art is nothing without form.

[The artist] is like a pump; he has inside him a great pipe that reaches down into the entrails of things, the deepest layers. He sucks up what was lying there below, dim and unnoticed, and brings it in great jets to the sunlight.

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

In the dark room a cloud of yellow dust flew from beneath the tool like a scatter of sparks from under the hooves of a galloping horse. The twin wheels turned and hummed. Binet was smiling, his chin down, his nostrils distended. He seemed lost in the kind of happiness which, as a rule, accompanies only those mediocre occupations that tickle the intelligence with easy difficulties, and satisfy it with a sense of achievement beyond which there is nothing left for dreams to feed on.