"There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic."

"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born."

"Creation which cannot express itself becomes madness."

"Ecstasy is the moment of exaltation from wholeness!"

"I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry."

"I say quotations are literary. They are good only when dealing with ideas, not with experience. Experience should be pure, unique."

"To withhold from living is to die ... the more you give of yourself to life the more life nourishes you."

"No desire of the body, but for what lies in there, what lies in the flesh, the world, the thought, the creation, the illumination."

"Experience teaches acceptance of the imperfect as life."

"Everything but happiness is neurosis."

"I miss the animal buoyancy of New York, the animal vitality. I did not mind that it had no meaning and no depth."

"In creation alone there is the possibility of perfection."

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations."

"Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!"

"I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls."

"No one but a woman in love ever sees the maximum of men's greatness ."

"Oh, God, I know no joy as great as a moment of rushing into a new love, no ecstasy like that of a new love. I swim in the sky; I float; my body is full of flowers, flowers with fingers giving me acute, acute caresses, sparks, jewels, quivers of joy, dizziness, such dizziness. Music inside of one, drunkenness. Only closing the eyes and remembering, and the hunger, the hunger for more, more, the great hunger, the voracious hunger, and thirst."

"I seek the real stuff of life. Profound drama."

"He left me at my hotel at 3:00 AM murmuring: "You're marvelous.""

"The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. Always an orchestra, and just as music traverses walls, so sensuality traverses the body and reaches up to ecstasy."

"The times in his studio when he washed his hands and they smoked, for his hands were so warm and the water so cold."

"Someday I'll be locked up for love insanity. "She loved too much.""

"I have so strong a sense of creation, of tomorrow, that I cannot get drunk, knowing I will be less alive, less well, less creative the next day."

"You cannot save people, you can only love them."

"He was insane with anger. Or is all insanity anger?"

"People living deeply have no fear of death."

"For me, the adventures of the mind, each inflection of thought, each movement, nuance, growth, discovery, is a source of exhilaration."

"When others asked the truth of me, I was convinced it was not the truth they wanted, but an illusion they could bear to live with."

"I need a place where I can shout and weep. I have to be a Spanish savage at some time of the day. I record here the hysteria life causes in me. The overflow of an undisciplined extravagance. To hell with taste and art, with all contractions and polishings. Here I shout, I dance, I weep, I gnash my teeth, I go mad — all by myself, in bad English, in chaos. It will keep me sane for the world and for art ."

"I disregard the proportions, the measures, the tempo of the ordinary world. I refuse to live in the ordinary world as ordinary women. To enter ordinary relationships. I want ecstasy. I am a neurotic — in the sense that I live in my world. I will not adjust myself to the world. I am adjusted to myself."

"I postpone death by living, by suffering, by error, by risking, by giving, by losing."

"This abdiction of life demanded of the artist is to be achieved only relatively. Most artists have retired too absolutely; they grow rusty, inflexible to the flow of currents."

"You are so terribly nimble, so clever. I distrust your cleverness. You make a wonderful pattern, everything is in its place, it looks convincingly clear, too clear. And meanwhile, where are you? Not on the clear surface of your ideas, but you have already sunk deeper, into darker regions, so that one only thinks one has been given all your thoughts, one only imagines you have emptied yourself in that clarity. But there are layers and layers — you're bottomless, unfathomable. Your clearness is deceptive. You are the thinker who arouses most confusion in me, most doubt, most disturbance."

"There will never be darkness because in both of us there's always movement, renewal, surprises. I have never known stagnation. Not even introspection has been a still experience..."

"I see myself wrapped in lies, which do not seem to penetrate my soul, as if they are not really a part of me. They are like costumes."

"To lie, of course, is to engender insanity."

"The basis of insincerity is the idealized image we hold of ourselves and wish to impose on others."

"Love reduces the complexity of living."

"Nothing too long imagined can be perfect in a worldly way."

"Women always think that when they have my shoes, my dress, my hairdresser, my makeup, it will all work the same way. They do not conceive of the witchcraft that is needed. They do not know that I am not beautiful but that I only appear to be at certain moments."

"Man can never know the kind of loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in a woman's womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. The woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a wave of pleasure in which he has bathed, and a charge of electric joy at contact with another. When man lies in her womb, she is fulfilled, each act of love is a taking of man within her, and act of birth and rebirth, of child bearing and man bearing. Man lies in her womb and is reborn each time anew with a desire to act, to BE. But for a woman, the climax is not in the birth, but in the moment when man rests inside of her."

"We don't have a language for the senses. Feelings are images, sensations are like musical sounds."

"Passion gives me moments of wholeness."

"My life is slowed up by thought and the need to understand what I am living."

"For you and for me the highest moment, the keenest joy, is not when our minds dominate but when we lose our minds..."

"The truly faithless one is the one who makes love to only a fraction of you. And denies the rest."

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."

"I had always believed in Andre Breton's freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels in thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into. "The cult of the marvelous." Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind."

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."

"Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live."