Favorite quotes

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

A thing derided is a thing dead; a laughing man is stronger than a suffering man.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes. When I brood over these marvelous pleasures I have enjoyed, I would be tempted to offer God a prayer of thanks if I knew he could hear me. Praised may he be for not creating me a cotton merchant, a vaudevillian, or a wit.

To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless.

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

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.

One mustn?t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.