Our element is unending immaturity.

You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.

Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.

The difference between western and eastern intellectuals is that the former have not been kicked in the ass enough.

We say 'forest' but this word is made of the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unencompassed. The earth. Clods of dirt. Pebbles. On a clear day you rest among ordinary, everyday things that have been familiar to you since childhood, grass, bushes, a dog (or a cat), a chair, but that changes when you realize that every object is an enormous army, an inexhaustible swarm.

When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has”: “I have had, you see, to resort more and more to very small, almost invisible pleasures, little extras. You've no idea how great one becomes with these little details, it's incredible how one grows.

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.