"The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head."

"There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul."

"He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world."

"Don’t for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels."

"I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it. He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another."

"That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier’s wrist."

"Commissions suit me. They set limits. Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs."

"You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."

"The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee."

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

"Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."

"Poetry is indispensable — if I only knew what for."

"The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed."

"What is history after all? History is facts which become lies in the end; legends are lies which become history in the end."

"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?"

"The trouble about the Académie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed."

"An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture."

"Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort."

"After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter."

"Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper."

"What is line? It is life. A line must live at each point along its course in such a way that the artist’s presence makes itself felt above that of the model... With the writer, line takes precedence over form and content. It runs through the words he assembles. It strikes a continuous note unperceived by ear or eye. It is, in a way, the soul’s style, and if the line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is missing and the writing dies."

"One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends."

"Depuis le jour de ma naissance, ma mort s'est mise en marche. Elle marche à ma rencontre, sans se presser."

"Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity."

"Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly."

"True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing."

"Poets don’t draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."

"The Louvre is like the morgue; one goes there to identify one’s friends."

"A prig always finds a last refuge in responsibility."

"I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead."

"What particularly attracted me [in his painting 'Still-life with Musical instruments', 1908 – 1909].. ..was the materialization of this new space that I felt to be in the offing. So I began to concentrate on still-life's, because in the still-life you have a tactile, I might almost say a manual space.. .This answered to the hankering I have always had to touch things and not merely see them. It was this space that particularly attracted me, for this was the first concern of Cubism, the investigation of space.. ..In tactile space you measure the distance separating you from the object, whereas in visual space you measure the distance separating things from each other. This is what led me, long ago, from landscape to still-life."

"One day I noticed that I could go on working art my motif no matter what the weather might be. I no longer needed the sun, for I took my light everywhere with me."

"We [ Picasso and Braque], were living in Montmartre, we saw each other every day.. ..We were like two mountaineers roped together."

"The painting is finished when it has erased the idea."

"Evidence exhausts the truth."

"Thanks to the oval I have discovered the meaning of the horizontal and the vertical."