The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car.

Alas! I do not believe that inspiration falls from heaven. think it rather the result of a profound indolence.

Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind.

I want the kind of readers who remain children at any cost. I can tell them at a glance: loyalty to that first enchantment guards better than any cosmetic; than any diet, against the insults of age. But alas for such readers, who would huddle safe and sound in the asylum of their credulous enchantment as if in the womb-our enervating century offends them by its chaos, its fidgets of light and space, the host of its excuses for dividing , for rending oneself from others and from oneself.

There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.

A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel, to risk his illegal instincts.

The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.