The hot hall full of painted girls and American soldiers is a saloon in some Western film. This noise drenches us, wakens us to do something else. It shows us a lost path.

The public only takes up yesterday as a stick to beat today.

Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically.

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system.

Poetry is a religion without hope. The poet exhausts himself in its service, knowing that, in the long run, a masterpiece is nothing but the performance of a trained dog on very shaky ground.

Anything of any importance cannot help but be unrecognizable, since it bears no resemblance to anything already known.