"In Paris a queer little man you may see, A little man all in gray; Rosy and round as an apple is he, Content with the present whate'er it may be, While from care and from cash he is equally free, And merry both night and day! "Ma foi! I laugh at the world." says he, "I laugh at the world, and the world laughs at me!" What a gay little man in gray."

"Nos amis, les ennemis."

"Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair! For me her constant flame appears; The garland she hath culled, I wear On brows bald since my thirty years. Ye veils that deck my loved one rare, Fall, for the crowning triumph's nigh. Ye Gods! but she is wondrous fair! And I, so plain a man am I!"

"Old age doth in sharp pains abound; We are belabored by the gout, Our blindness is a dark profound, Our deafness each one laughs about. Then reason's light with falling ray Doth but a trembling flicker cast. Honor to age, ye children pay! Alas! my fifty years are past!"

"Ce n'est que lorsqu'il expira Que le peuple, qui l'enterra, pleura."

"Adieu! 'tis love's last greeting, The parting hour is come! And fast thy soul is fleeting To seek its starry home."

"Each year his mighty armies marched forth in gallant show, Their enemies were targets, their bullets they were tow."

"Radio through television becomes a species of Cinema. Why shouldn't Cinema, in turn, become a species of radio?"

"I desire you, and all that comes with you. If I could only buy you and enjoy you, without having to go through all the formalities, without having to consider your personality et cetera … There is nothing as boring as human personality."

"There is no "worst" in what is new. Everything that has existed is bad, or else no one would have improved upon it by revolution and change."

"From the point of view of photography, I'll smite the picture with sun rays. I'll take old stock shots and scratch them; I'll claw at them so that unknown beauty sees the light of day. I shall sculpt flowers upon the film stock."

"There are so many films from which one leaves as stupid as one entered. I'd rather give you a migraine than nothing at all … I'd rather ruin your eyes than leave you indifferent."

"It is said that the public is stupid. That's why those who hold it in contempt never dare to offer it something original."

"Your hissing and your booing make no impression on me, because from Victor Hugo's "Ernani" to Buñel's "The Age of Gold," Cannes Grand Prize winner, everything I have loved has always been hissed and booed at first. At the premiere of "The Age of Gold" the angry audience broke the theatre seats. What worse can happen to me, and how can that affect me? The seats do not belong to me."

"Our only means of original manifestation is to vomit these old masterpieces. Masterful spittle is our only opportunity to create within the Cinema our masterpieces. That's what Picasso stands for. He is a creator of deglutition and spittle, of old well-digested canvases."

"The flourishing of bursts of energy dies beyond us."

"The rigidity of forms impedes their transmission."

"The Cinema is too rich; it is obese."

"The evolution of art has nothing to do with the revolution of society."

"In my pictures I would use speech as an extra dimension supplementing the image … Speech would not come off the screen in coincidence with the sequences, but from without, as if it were a surplus unconnected with the organism - a cravat of drivel hung on an ivory tooth."

"A mops thinks 'I commited heresy'. But did it? To be a heretic, you have to know the Spirit."

"Benáres, that name is full of odours which have fled. By thy shores I saw the smoke from the pyres of three dead."

"We loved each other. No faithfulness my love did lack. Love, you divine flame; you hole of colour: black."

"Pick me up, o stranger, it is no sin, so lovely is my smell. Violet's a smile of those who in their graves now dwell."

"In that poem "keeping vigil" for René Char means writing the poem. The poem is the vigil. Sometimes one wants to hold up a lighted wick before a certain name. In the case of Char it has to do with the fusion of poetry and active resistance to fascism, in his life, with no loss to the poetry. Leaves of Hypnos is also a record of an unusual masculinity caught up in war but not deluded by it."

"History has always felt to me an immense resource for art, and poetry as a place where history can be kept alive-not grandmaster narratives, but otherwise forgotten or erased people and actions...In Midnight Salvage there's the poem drawn from René Char's resistance journals"

"I think of the poetry of René Char and all he must have seen and suffered that has brought him to speak only of sedgy rivers, of daffodils and tulips whose roots they water, even to the free-flowing river that laves the rootlets of those sweet-scented flowers that people the milky way"

"A tour de force into the ineffable."

"Un poète doit laisser des traces de son passage, non des preuves. Seules les traces font rêver."

"With my teeth I have seized life Upon the knife of my youth. With my lips today, With my lips alone…"

"The cries of a dying dog are to be blotted out as best I can. René Char you are a poet who believes in the power of beauty to right all wrongs. I believe it also. With invention and courage we shall surpass the pitiful dumb beasts, let all men believe it, as you have taught me also to believe it."

"Char embodies the ideal of the poet fighting for the nobility of the world — the leader of a small resistance group dedicated to honoring the ten thousand things of the universe. Mountains and rivers, flowers and vipers, meteors and rain — everything teems with meaning for this poet. … Illumination was his theme, his method — "For me lightning lasts," Char declared. His work is an essay in revelation."

"I believe in the magic and authority of words."

"Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a battle of embers never to subside again."

"Demander à la poésie du sentimentalisme…ce n'est pas ça. Des mots rayonnants, des mots de lumière…avec un rythme et une musique, voilà ce que c'est, la poésie."

"The second romantics are true seers: Th. Gautier, Lec. de Lisle, Th. de Banville. But to explore the invisible and to hear the unheard are very different from reviving the dead."

"L'art pour l'art signifie, pour les adeptes, un travail dégagé de toute préoccupation autre que celle du beau en lui-même."

"Je suis un homme pour qui le monde visible existe."

"Le hasard, c'est peut-être le pseudonyme de Dieu quand il ne veut pas signer."

"Ils sont si transparents qu'ils laissent voir votre âme."

"Le poète est ainsi dans les Landes du monde. Lorsqu'il est sans blessure, il garde son trésor. Il faut qu'il ait au cœur une entaille profonde Pour épancher ses vers, divines larmes d'or!"

"Naître, c'est seulement commencer à mourir."

"Virginité, mysticisme, mélancolie, – trois mots inconnus, – trois maladies nouvelles apportées par le Christ."

"Oui, l'œuvre sort plus belle D'une forme au travail Rebelle, Vers, marbre, onyx, émail."

"Il n'y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tout ce qui est utile est laid."

"Tout passe. – L'art robuste Seul a l'éternité, Le buste Survit à la cité. Et la médaille austère Que trouve un laboureur Sous terre Révèle un empereur."