We are lived by powers we pretend to understand.

But if a stranger in the train asks me my occupation, I never answer "writer" for fear that he may go on to ask me what I write, and to answer "poetry" would embarrass us both, for we both know that nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry.

The relation of faith between subject and object is unique in every case. Hundreds may believe, but each has to believe by himself.

I know nothing, except what everyone knows - if there when Grace dances, I should dance.

One of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.

To me Art's subject is the human clay, / And landscape but a background to a torso; / All Cezanne's apples I would give away / For one small Goya or a Daumier.

In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.