Why do people always expect authors to answer questions? I am an author because I want to ask questions. If I had answers, I’d be a politician.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

A writer never takes a vacation. For a writer life consists of either writing or thinking about writing

Banality is a symptom of non-communication. Men hide behind their cliches.

We have not the time to take our time.

BERENGER: And you consider all this natural? DUDARD: What could be more natural than a rhinoceros? BERENGER: Yes, but for a man to turn into a rhinoceros is abnormal beyond question. DUDARD: Well, of course,...

No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition...

Nothing is mightier than our why, nothing stands above it, because in the end there is a why to which no answer is possible. In fact, from why to why, from one step to the...

Like all revolutions, the surrealist revolution was a reversion, a restitution, an expression of vital and indispensable spiritual needs.

Living is abnormal.

Realism falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It presents man in a reduced and...

The unpleasant thing about society today is nowadays is that there is a confusion between people and their function; or rather, people are tempted to identify with the function they perform. This is what’s happening,...

But even if I know what governs their trajectory, if I know the rules of the movement of things and how things are organized and how certain mutations, transformations, gestations take place, even if I...

A civil servant doesn’t make jokes.

Realism, whether it be socialist or not, falls short of reality. It shrinks it, attenuates it, falsifies it; it does not take into account our basic truths and our fundamental obsessions: love, death, astonishment. It...

Oh words, what crimes are committed in your name?~Jack or The Submission

You can only predict things after they’ve happened

It is not the answer that enlightens, but the question.

The poet cannot invent new words every time, of course. He uses the words of the tribe. But the handling of the word, the accent, a new articulation, renew them.

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; as though there were no foundations for anything or as though it...

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality… Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of...

I’ve always been suspicious of collective truths.

Childhood is the world of miracle and wonder; as if creation rose, bathed in the light, out of the darkness, utterly new and fresh and astonishing. The end of childhood is when things cease to...

A civil servant doesn’t make jokes

The light of memory, or rather the light that memory lends to things, is the palest light of all. I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my...

Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible.

There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation.

I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a ‘will to renewal’. This is not the prerogative of the last decade only....

Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.

The critic should describe, and not prescribe.

Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.

A nose that can see is worth two that sniff.

You can only predict things after they have happened.

Marx was wrong; jealousy and pride, emotional forces, are just as responsible as hunger and necessity for our actions; they explain the whole of History, and the initial fall of man.

Shakespeare was the great one before us. His place was between God and despair.

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to ”realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have ”succeeded,” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is ”realizable.”...

Year after year of dirty snow and bitter winds… houses and whole districts of people who aren’t really unhappy, but worse, who are neither happy nor unhappy; people who are ugly because they’re neither ugly...

Everything that has been will be, everything that will be is, everything that will be has been.

Ideologies separate us. Dreams and anguish bring us together.

A man with a soul is not like every other man.

I read a page of Plato’s great work. I can no longer understand anything, because behind the words on the page, which have their own heavenly brightness, to be sure, there shines an even brighter,...

The universe seems to me infinitely strange and foreign. At such a moment I gaze upon it with a mixture of anguish and euphoria; separate from the universe, as though placed at a certain distance...

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind

I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of...

I’ll never waste my dreams by falling asleep. Never again.

Idiom is larger than geography; it is the hot breath of a people singing, slashing, explorative. Imagery becomes the magic denominator, the language of a passage, saying the ancient unchanging particulars.

You’ve always made the mistake of being yourself