The audience bursts into laughter. With the tragic gag I don't expect the audience to laugh (if they do, I have failed) but I expect a black silence ….

The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness..

I have never felt any connection with my family. There is—I must say simply—something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my fath….

Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind..

And history becomes legend and legend becomes history..

I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes..

Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble..

When we awake it is the animal, the plant, that thinks in us. Primitive thought without the least disguise. We see a terrible universe, because we se….

Statues to great men are made of the stones thrown at them in their lifetime..

The poet Paul Éluard says that to understand my film version of Beauty and the Beast, you must love your dog more than your car..

Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality..

Understand that some of your enemies are amongst your best friends..

Be a mere assistant to your unconscious. Do only half the work. The rest will do itself..

Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed..

After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter..

The only work of art which succeeds is that which fails..

Vivre est une chute horizontale. Life is a horizontal fall..

A man's truest self realizations might require him, above all, to learn to close his eyes: to let himself be taken unawares, to follow his dark angel….

Silence moves faster when it's going backward..

In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator..

It seems to me that invisibility is the required provision of elegance. Elegance ceases to exist when it is noticed..