Some sort of pressure must exist; the artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

Without literature, life is hell.

Without magic, there is no art. Without art, there is no idealism. Without idealism, there is no integrity. Without integrity, there is nothing but production.

If the world can no longer afford the luxury of natural beauty, then it will soon be overcome and destroyed by its own ugliness.

All art is quite useless.

There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.

Art was the very antithesis of crass moralism.

Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.

It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.

There's no comfort, it seems, in the world of objects.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after.

Reality calls for a name, for words, but it is unbearable, and if it is touched, if it draws very close, the poet’s mouth cannot even utter a complaint of Job: all art proves to be nothing compared with action. Yet to embrace reality in such a manner that it is preserved in all its old tangle of good and evil, of despair and hope, is possible only thanks to distance, only by soaring above it — but this in turn seems then a moral treason.

The world has an awful beauty. This is a chaotic place, humanity is a chaotic place, and I am a chaotic place.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.