I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.

Silence moves faster when it's going backward.

The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, the finish by loading honors on your head.

I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.

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

If an addict who has been completely cured starts smoking again he no longer experiences the discomfort of his first addiction. There exists, therefore, outside alkaloids and habit, a sense for opium, an intangible habit which lives on, despite the recasting of the organism. The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house.

Nothing is more intriguing than a still photograph in the middle of a motion picture... Just as an accident is a cry changed into silence and not a silence after a cry, photography is speed rendered motionless.