So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

Man is an imagining being.

Ideas are refined and multiplied in the commerce of minds. In their splendor, images effect a very simple communion of souls.

Even a minor event in the life of a child is an event of that child's world and thus a world event.

Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books.

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

The characteristic of scientific progress is our knowing that we did not know.

To live life well is to express life poorly; if one expresses life too well, one is living it no longer.

The subconscious is ceaselessly murmuring, and it is by listening to these murmurs that one hears the truth.

The great function of poetry is to give back to us the situations of our dreams.

Man is a creation of desire, not a creation of need.

If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

The words of the world want to make sentences.

A special kind of beauty exists which is born in language, of language, and for language.

One must always maintain one's connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

There is no original truth, only original error.

Poetry is one of the destinies of speech... One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language.

So, like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.

Reverie is not a mind vacuum. It is rather the gift of an hour which knows the plenitude of the soul.

Two half philosophers will probably never a whole metaphysician make.

Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.

One must always maintain ones connection to the past and yet ceaselessly pull away from it.

Cosmic reveries separate us from project reveries. They situate us in a world and not in a society. The cosmic reverie possesses a sort of stability or tranquility. It helps us escape time. It is a state.

Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.

The poetic image is not an echo of the past. On the contrary through the brilliance of any image the distant past resounds with echoes.

The metaphor is an origin, the origin of an image which acts directly, immediately.

By listening to certain words as a child listens to the sea in a seashell, a word dreamer hears the murmur of a world of dreams.

A man is a man to the extent that he is a superman. A man should be defined by the sum of those tendencies which impel him to surpass the human condition.

A sister is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.

A lot of people have gotten into comedy because of certain influences in their lives or events that were painful, and I really have wracked my brain to figure it out. I pretty much have had a normal childhood. Maybe it was too normal.

It sounds ideal, a sort of beach childhood. But it wasn't really. I didn't use the beach very much at all.

All our pursuits, from childhood to manhood, are only trifles of different sorts and sizes, proportioned to our years and views.

The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I don't carry any early childhood trauma around with me, if that's what you're hinting at. The story of the bicycles - and there were three of them which were stolen from me - I've dealt with it well.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

Hors d'oeuvres have always a pathetic interest for me; they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through wondering what the next course is going to be like - and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres.

Arguably, no artist grows up: If he sheds the perceptions of childhood, he ceases being an artist.

Everything I write comes from my childhood in one way or another. I am forever drawing on the sense of mystery and wonder and possibility that pervaded that time of my life.

Well I was an asthmatic child. So that for most of my childhood I was in bed. Bedridden.

Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall to the old man the pleasures of his youth, and transport the traveler back to his own fireside and quiet home!

I think actors always retain one foot in the cradle. We're switched on to our youth, to our childhood. We have to be because we're in the business of transferring emotions to other people.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

I had a kind of Dickensian childhood.

Friendships in childhood are usually a matter of chance, whereas in adolescence they are most often a matter of choice.

I didn't have a happy childhood.

These days, there are a great many books about childhood trauma and its effects, but at the time all the experts agreed that one should forget about it as quickly as possible and pick up where you left off.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

My whole family actually, but my parents. I had such a normal and amazing childhood. I've been so lucky. My parents are cool and normal. They don't talk about the business and I still have stuff to do at their house.

From childhood I was passionately fond of music and wanted to be a musician. I have no recollection of any real desire ever to be anything else.