“Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping.”

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you.”

“Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.”

“Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.”

“In two weeks, despite these notes, I shall no longer believe in what I am experiencing now. One must leave behind a trace of this journey which memory forgets. One must, when this is impossible, write or draw without responding to the romantic solicitations of pain, without enjoying suffering like music, tieing a pen to one's foot if need be, helping the doctors who can learn nothing from laziness.”

“We are in a period of such individualism that one no longer speaks of disciples; one speaks of thieves.”

“The poet doesn't invent. He listens. ”