All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

Those who live, live off the dead.

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.

Don't tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar's teeth.

When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

When we speak the word 'life,' it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

Cruelty signifies rigor implacable intention and decision irreversible and absolute determination.

We do not die because we have to die we die because one day and not so long ago our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary.

I see in the act of throwing the dice and of risking the affirmation of some intuitively felt truth however uncertain my whole reason for living.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything -- gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness -- rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.

Still, language is resilient, and poetry when it is pressured simply goes underground.

I have my own language and it's high time I put a little of it out there.

Well, with the French language, which I understood and spoke, however imperfectly, and read in great quantities, at certain times, the matter I suppose was slightly different from either Latin or Greek.

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

Poetry is a matter of life, not just a matter of language.

Our purpose is simply to ask how theological principles can be shown to have usable secular analogues that throw light upon the nature of language.

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

French is a language that makes those who speak it both calm and dynamic.

I have eighteen titles in the German language. I had a number one song in 1965.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

The Internet is not just one thing, it's a collection of things - of numerous communications networks that all speak the same digital language.

Of all of our inventions for mass communication, pictures still speak the most universally understood language.

If I were assigned poems I suppose I'd write more of them but it is entirely voluntary and for the most part ignored in the market sense of the word so the language to me is most intimate, most important, most sublime and most satisfying when it gets done.

Music is the soul of language.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

For me concrete poetry was a particular way of using language which came out of a particular feeling, and I don't have control over whether this feeling is in me or not.

I think I am too interested in my own ideas to copy anyone else's, but I find that other people's imagery, the flow of language in the outside world, games with words, and ideas about relationships are all most important to me.

I don't see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests.

There are infinite shadings of light and shadows and colors... it's an extraordinarily subtle language. Figuring out how to speak that language is a lifetime job.

Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage.

I'm really fascinated and you know I've been wondering about that usage of language, various breathing techniques and why in these practices language is being used in another way.

Two races share today the soil of Canada. These people had not always been friends. But I hasten to say it. There is no longer any family here but the human family. It matters not the language people speak, or the altars at which they kneel.

When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images.

One of the most misleading representational techniques in our language is the use of the word 'I.'

Language is the soul of intellect, and reading is the essential process by which that intellect is cultivated beyond the commonplace experiences of everyday life.

To handle a language skillfully is to practice a kind of evocative sorcery.

They are damn good projects - excellent projects. That goes for all the projects up there. You know some people make fun of people who speak a foreign language, and dumb people criticize something they do not understand, and that is what is going on up there - God damn it!

Poetry is ordinary language raised to the Nth power. Poetry is boned with ideas, nerved and blooded with emotions, all held together by the delicate, tough skin of words.

The Catholic faith never changes. But the language and mode of manifesting this one faith can change according to peoples, times and places.