For none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and 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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There are in me, in literary terms, two distinct characters: one who is taken with roaring, with lyricism, with soaring aloft, with all the so...
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Human speech is a cracked cauldron on which we knock out tunes for dancing bears, when we wish to conjure pity from the stars.
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That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
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Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.
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A child of my own! Oh, no, no, no! Let my flesh perish with me, and let me not transmit to anyone the boredom and ignominiousness of life.
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The one way of tolerating existence is to lose oneself in literature as in a perpetual orgy.
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...exaggerated turns of speech conceal mediocre affections: as if the fulness of the soul might not sometimes overflow in the emptiest of metaphors, since no one, ever, can give the exact measurements of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sufferings, and the human word is like a cracked cauldron upon which we beat out melodies fit for making bears dance when we are trying to move the stars to pity.
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Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.
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Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
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The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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Of all lies, art is the least untrue
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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 o...
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Be regular and orderly in your life, that you may be violent and original in your work.
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A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
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Once one has kissed a cadaver's forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertaste of nothingne...
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The most important quality of art and its aim is illusion; emotion, which is often obtained by certain sacrifices of poetic detail, is somethi...
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The human language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out a tune for a dancing bear, when we hope with our music to move the stars.
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To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.
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What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but ...
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Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
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The artist must be in his work like God in his Creation, invisible and all-powerful, so that he is felt everywhere but not seen.
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The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe
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Our ignorance of history makes us libel to our own times. People have always been like this.
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Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.
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Read in order to live.
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Perfection is the enemy of the good.
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One mustn't always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.
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One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.
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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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