The basic unit for contemporary art is not the idea, but the analysis of and extension of sensations.

Sanity is a cozy lie.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The taste for quotations (and for the juxtaposition of incongruous quotations) is a Surrealist taste.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

What is the most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.

I haven't been everywhere, but it's on my list.

In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

Surrealism in painting amounted to little more than the contents of a meagerly stocked dream world: a few witty fantasies, mostly wet dreams and agoraphobic nightmares.

It is easier to endure than to change. But once one has changed, what was endured is hard to recall.

A large part of the popularity and persuasiveness of psychology comes from its being a sublimated spiritualism: a secular, ostensibly scientific way of affirming the primacy of "spirit" over matter.

To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.

I've never been front and centre as an iconic American character [like in Doctor Strange]. Day to day, you know you're painting on a very big canvas.

The only human being I could tell everything was my sister Françoise. She and I were so diametrically different; put together we would have been a fantastic woman.

I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?

When something has been perfect, there is a tendency to try hard to repeat it.

Architecture is the real battleground of the spirit.

It's called Paris, not Hilton, just me, because I don't want people to think it's my family's. It's mine.

Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.

The Black Mountain poet I like most is the early Creeley. Those early poems seem very lyrical and very traditional, with a lot of voice and character.

If it's not fun, I'm not going to do it.