Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.

Cultivate everything the critics hated in your first work - that's what makes you unique.

Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.

And now I have to confess the unpardonable and the scandalous. I am a happy man. And I am going to tell you the secret of my happiness. It is quite simple. I love mankind. I love love. I hate hate. I try to understand and accept.

Fight any instinct to be humorless, for humorlessness is the worst of all absurdities.

The composer opens the cage door for arithmetic, the draftsman gives geometry its freedom.

Picasso said that everything is a miracle, that it's a miracle that we don't dissolve in our baths.