The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what goes on within ourselves.

I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.

My figures come and go, suggested by fortune or misfortune. I try to fix them divested of their apparent accidental quality.

Painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement.

There is nothing I hate more than sentimentality.

What are you? What am I? Those are the questions that constantly persecute and torment me and perhaps also play some part in my art.

Space, and space again, is the infinite deity which surrounds us and in which we are ourselves contained.

Height, width, and depth are the three phenomena which I must transfer into one plane to form the abstract surface of the picture, and thus to protect myself from the infinity of space.

The stronger and more intense my desire becomes to capture and record that which is unsayable, the more tightly my mouth stays shut.

The greatest mystery of all is reality.

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.

Let your feelings flow and the scribbled words stay as a sovereign of the moment.

Life truly is what you make it. The purpose and meaning of life is the purpose and meaning that you give it.

Common sense means living in the world as it is today; but creative people are people who don't want the world as it is today but want to make another world.

It's not about an opening weekend. It's about a career, building a set of films you're proud of. Period.

When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.

Of what use are laws, inoperative through public immortality? [Lat., Quid leges sine moribus Vanae proficiunt?]

Some providences, like Hebrew letters, must be read backwards.

The very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer.

Surrealism is a bourgeois disaffection; that its militants thought it universal is only one of the signs that it is typically bourgeois.