Quote collection
334 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Two aesthetics exist: the passive aesthetic of mirrors and the active aesthetic of prisms. Guided by the former, art turns into a copy of the environment's objectivity or the individual's psychic history. Guided by the latter, art is redeemed, makes the world into its instrument, and forges, beyond spatial and temporal prisons, a personal vision."
"Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art."
"My books standing there on the shelf do not know that I have written them."
"He consorted with prostitutes and poets...and with persons even worse."
"The things that are said in literature are always the same. What is important is the way they are said."
"The gods weave misfortunes for men, so that the generations to come will have something to sing about.” Mallarmé repeats, less beautifully, what Homer said; “tout aboutit en un livre,” everything ends up in a book. The Greeks speak of generations that will sing; Mallarmé speaks of an object, of a thing among things, a book. But the idea is the same; the idea that we are made for art, we are made for memory, we are made for poetry, or perhaps we are made for oblivion. But something remains, and that something is history or poetry, which are not essentially different."
"My undertaking is not difficult, essentially. I should only have to be immortal to carry it out."
"I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man, myself alone. From out of a whirlwind the voice of God replied: I am not, either. I dreamed the world the way you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare: one of the forms of my dream was you, who, like me, are many and one."
"The visible universe was an illusion or, more precisely, a sophism. Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply it and extend it."
"I suppose every poet has his own private mythology. Maybe he's unaware of it. People tell me that I have evolved a private mythology of tigers, of blades, of labyrinths, and I"m unaware of the fact this is so. My readers are finding it all the time. But I think perhaps that is the duty of poet."
"To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know that one is immortal."
"We have a very precise image - an image at times shameless - of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it."
"When I wake up, I wake to something worse. It’s the astonishment of being myself"
"I never reread what I've written. I'm far too afraid to feel ashamed of what I've done."
"Every novel is an ideal plane inserted into the realm of reality."
"To die for a religion is easier than to live it absolutely."
"We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men."
"I...have always known that my destiny was, above all, a literary destiny — that bad things and some good things would happen to me, but that, in the long run, all of it would be converted into words. Particularly the bad things, since happiness does not need to be transformed: happiness is its own end."
"The central fact of my life has been the existence of words and the possibility of weaving those words into poetry."
"Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing, the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting."