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I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
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The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful one must sense him everywhere but never see him.
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The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
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Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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One mustn’t ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.
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There is no truth. There is only perception.
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Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.
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The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.
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All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
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All one’s inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.
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Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.
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Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
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Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.
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Stupidity is something unshakable nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.
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I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.
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Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
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The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.
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The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
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There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.