"Books that teach us to dance: There..." - Quote by Friedrich Nietzsche

“The elimination of the will altogether and the switching off of the emotions all and sundry, is tantamount to the elimination of reason: intellectual castration.”

“When a man has just been greatly honored and has eaten a little he is the most generous.”

“one does not only wish to be understood when one writes; one wishes just as surely not to be understood.”

“Reading [poetry], you know, is rather like opening the door to a horde of rebels who swarm out attacking one in twenty places at once - hit, roused, scraped, bared, swung through the air, so that life seems to flash by; then again blinded, knocked on the head - all of which are agreeable sensations for a reader (since nothing is more dismal than to open the door and get no response).”

“I am madness maddened when it comes to books, writers, and the great granary silos where their wits are stored.”

“When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

“The work of art is born of the intelligence's refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.”

“I've read all of Shakespeare and practiced a lot of lines. ... I am going to do Juliet first. Don't laugh. What, with what makeup, costume and camera can do, my acting will create a Juliet who is 14, an innocent virgin.”

“I believe I have had the most trouble with a portrait which I painted in installments - the head on one canvas and the bust on another.”