It's the pleasure of picking up the brush and seeing what happens.

If one believes, then miracles occur.

The essential thing is to WANT to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.

The waking mind, you see, is the least serviceable in the arts.

And what is the potential man, after all? Is he not the sum of all that is human? Divine, in other words?

The Frenchman is first and foremost a man. He is likeable often just because of his weaknesses, which are always thoroughly human, even if despicable.

I didn't dare to think of anything then except the "facts." To get beneath the facts I would have had to be an artist, and one doesn't become an artist overnight. First you have to be crushed, to have your conflicting points of view annihilated. You have to be wiped out as a human being in order to be born again an individual. You have to be carbonized and mineralized in order to work upwards from the last common denominator of the self. You have to get beyond pity in order to feel from the very roots of your being.