What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin: impatience. Because of impatience we were driven out of Paradise, because of impatience we cannot return.

Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.

Art is born of humiliation.

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.

No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent human actions called Games.

Now is the age of anxiety.

When I am in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.

You owe it to all of us all get on with what you're good at.

All that we are not stares back at what we are.

Good can imagine Evil; but Evil cannot imagine Good.

Learn from your dreams what you lack.

Music can be made anywhere, is invisible and does not smell.

One cannot walk through an assembly factory and not feel that one is in Hell.

Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.

The words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living.

Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.

A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.

A poet is a professional maker of verbal objects.