True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics.

Now I no longer live in our clear, rational world; I live in the ancient nightmare world, the world of square roots of minus one.

There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.

The whole world is one immense woman, and we are in her very womb, we are not yet born, we are joyfully ripening.

What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturabtion … whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.

We have long become overgrown with calluses; we no longer hear people being killed. ("X")

The highly complex, almost mathematical, nature of music creates for it an ironclad protection against the microbes of dilletantism, which penetrate much more easily into the fields of painting, literature, and the theater.