My poems mean what people take them to mean.

Liberty is the hardest test that one can inflict on a people. To know how to be free is not given equally to all men and all nations.

Serious people have few ideas. People with ideas are never serious.

No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.

Man cannot bear his own portrait. The image of his limits and his own determinacy exasperates him, drives him mad.

Everything changes but the avant-garde.

You have certainly observed the curious fact that a given word which is perfectly clear when you hear it or use it in everyday language, and which does not give rise to any difficulty when it is engaged in the rapid movement of an ordinary sentence becomes magically embarrassing, introduces a strange resistance, frustrates any effort at definition as soon as you take it out of circulation to examine it separately and look for its meaning after taking away its instantaneous function.