“Artists who are the defenders of true life become phonies. That’s the perfidious thing about this world. Society turns anyone with a bit of life inside them into a medical case.”

“Humor is our way of defending ourselves from life's absurdities by thinking absurdly about them.”

“[on becoming an artist] It is my profession, yes [ to be an artist] but a calling.. that a little bit pathetic, a little bit bombastic. I think it was much more natural... I Thought – when I was a child – the only method to be not in the world but outside of the world is to be an artist. I feel me outside, yes..”

“The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.”

“The appearance of stability from 1840 to about 1900 was superficial, temporary and destructive in the long run… because communities and societies must rest upon cooperation and not upon competition. Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community.”

“Things are never beautiful by themselves but appear so to anyone who projects on to them his superabundance of life. But just as unconscious activity is unaware of itself as such, so man ‘forgets himself’ as the cause of these ‘beauties’ and imagines that the world itself is laden with them.”

“Undoubtedly I have done harm to the society, but I have done it for defending my life, I would set fire to the whole world for it.”

“Remember it all, every insult, every tear. Tattoo it on the inside of your mind. In life, knowledge of poisons is essential. I've told you, nobody becomes an artist unless they have to.”

“The noblest are they who turning from the things the vulgar crave, seek the source of a blessed life in worlds to which the senses do not lead.”

“An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.”