I have never been able to accept the two great laws of humanity--that you're always being suppressed if you're inspired and always... being pushed into the corner if you're exceptional. I won't be cornered and I won't stay suppressed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have always had something to live besides a personal life. And I suspected very early that to live merely in an experience of, i...n an expression of, in a positive delight in the human cliches could be no business of mine.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the ... radio station played a Chopin polonaise. On all the following days news bulletins were prefaced by Chopin--preludes, e...tudes, waltzes, mazurkas. The war became for me a victory, known in advance, Chopin over Hitler.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
...I didn't consider intellectuals intelligent, I never liked them or their thoughts about life. I defined them as people who care... nothing for argument, who are interested only in information; or as people who have a preference for learning things rather than experiencing them. They have opinions but no point of view.... Their talk is the gloomiest type of human discourse I know.... This is a red flag to my nature. Intellectuals, to me have no natures ...LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... laws haven't the slightest interest for me--except in the world of science, in which they are always changing; or in the world... of art, in which they are unchanging; or in the world of Being in which they are, for the most part, unknown.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It has been years since I have seen anyone who could even look as if he were in love. No one's face lights up any more except for ...political conversation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Art to me was a state, it didn't need to be an accomplishment. By any of the standards of production, achievement, performance, I ...was not an artist. But I always thought of myself as one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Paris is the city in which one loves to live. Sometimes I think this is because it is the only city in the world where you can ste...p out of a railway station--the Gare D'Orsay--and see, simultaneously, the chief enchantments: the Seine with its bridges and bookstalls, the Louvre, Notre Dame, the Tuileries Gardens, the Place de la Concorde, the beginning of the Champs Elysees--nearly everything except the Luxembourg Gardens and the Palais Royal. But what other city offers as much as you leave a train?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »