What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.
If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.
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.
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.
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.
The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.
Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet's job. The rest is literature.
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.
Life is a horizontal fall.
Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.
Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.
The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.
Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.
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.
The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.
Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.
Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.
A film is a petrified fountain of thought.