“I think those neighborhood signs that say 'slow children playing' are so very mean.”

“Oh, I'm staying in today. And watch the others play. Oh, wash my sins away. Like all good children I mean what I say.”

“Slow yellow river flowing, willows that gesture in tepid August airs, and four children playing at greatness, as, doubtless, great men themselves must play.”

“The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist.”

“But if you say: "How am I to know what he means, when I see nothing but the signs he gives?" then I say: "How is he to know what he means, when he has nothing but the signs either?"”

“I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children's zoo. Last week, four kids escaped.”

“It happens that all those who have something of mine, painting, mobile, or static statue, say that it makes them very happy. For example, children adore mobile statues and understand their meaning immediately. I have seen children, here in France, in America or in Great Britain, run and shout with joy in my exhibitions. They like it instinctively.”

“I think that virtuosity is the first sign of morality in a musician. It means you're serious enough to practice.”

“I play a lot of those parts, and it's a chicken-and-egg thing. I don't know whether you get scary because you play those parts or did you get those parts because you were scary? But I do believe that there's a very close connection to what's scary and what's funny. So I think if you have the ability to do one, you might have the ability to do the other.”

“I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It's a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say an idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don't exist until you say them."
"A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed.”