Great Throughts Treasury

"In any society, the artist has a responsibility. Their effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of nonconformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is very important."

"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing."

"Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether."

"I can't help feeling that there is no beauty without hope, struggle, and conquest."

"Age is something that doesn't matter, unless you are a cheese."

"A paranoiac, like a poet, is born, not made."

"A life without memory is no life at all."

"All my life I've been harassed by questions: Why is something this way and not another? How do you account for that? This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If we could only find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence."

"At the end of the latter projection, the fifth or sixth, rushed towards me, full of joy, and said:"

"As inexplicable as the accidents that set it off, our imagination is a crucial privilege. I've tried my whole life simply to accept the images that present themselves to me without trying to analyze them. I remember when we were shooting That Obscure Object of Desire in Seville and I suddenly found myself telling Fernando Rey, at the end of a scene, to pick up a big sack filled with tools lying on a bench, sling it over his shoulder, and walk away. The action was completely irrational, yet it seemed absolutely right to me. Still, I was worried about it, so I shot two versions of the scene: one with the sack, one without. But during the rushes the following day, the whole crew agreed that the scene was much better with the sack. Why? I can't explain it, and I don't enjoy rummaging around in the cliches of psychoanalysis."

"Bound, elbow to elbow, darkness and night entered the dwelling."

"Frankly, despite my distaste of the press, I'd love to rise from the grave every ten years or so and go buy a few newspapers."

"But I think we must avoid seeing, these necessary laws that allow us to live together, a need fundamental, primal. It seems, in fact, it is not necessary that this world exists, it is not necessary to be here living and dying. Since we are only the children of chance, the earth and the universe could have continued without us until the end of time. Picture unimaginable in an empty universe and infinite theoretically useless, that no intelligence could contemplate that exist alone, enduring chaos, abyss inexplicably private life. Perhaps other worlds, we do not know, so follow its course inconceivable. Attraction to the chaos that sometimes feel deeply into ourselves."

"Even today, I've no idea what the truth is, or what I did with it."

"Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams."

"I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life."

"However, the Noailles wrote me to ask if I could find some interesting work to Aldous Huxley. Delicious naivet‚ ."

"I also remember being struck by de Sade's will, in which he asked that his ashes be scattered to the four corners of the earth in the hope that humankind would forget both his writings and his name. I'd like to be able to make that demand; commemorative ceremonies are not only false but dangerous, as are all statues of famous men. Long live forgetfulness, I've always said?the only dignity I see is in oblivion."

"God and Country are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed."

"I like go to bed and get up early; in that, I am anti-Spanish."

"I have to confess here that the admiration I have for the theater of Lorca is rather scarce. His life and his personality far outweighed his work, which I find often rhetorical and mannered."

"I said that would have me read Sade before everything else."

"If I had to list all the virtues of alcohol, would never end."

"I would add-Dali-noted that the Surrealists were handsome."

"If alcohol is queen, then tobacco is her consort. It's a fond companion for all occasions, a loyal friend through fair weather and foul. People smoke to celebrate a happy moment, or to hide a bitter regret. Whether you're alone or with friends, it's a joy for all the senses. What lovelier sight is there than that double row of white cigarettes, lined up like soldiers on parade and wrapped in silver paper? I love to touch the pack in my pocket, open it, savor the feel of the cigarette between my fingers, the paper on my lips, the taste of tobacco on my tongue. I love to watch the flame spurt up, love to watch it come closer and closer, filling me with its warmth."

"If one of the drivers passed us with a straight face, I thought. It's over, we lost. He read it in the face. 'If, by contrast, spent smiling politely, told me: The thing must be very bad. Want reassure."

"If I say: you have twenty years of life, what you like to do twenty-four hours of each day that you live?, I would say, give me two hours of active life and twenty hours of dreams, with the condition then you can remember, because there is only sleep with the memory that caresses him."

"If you were to ask me if I'd ever had the bad luck to miss my daily cocktail, I'd have to say that I doubt it; where certain things are concerned, I plan ahead."

"If the devil were to offer me a resurgence of what is commonly called virility, I'd decline. Just keep my liver and lungs in good working order, I'd reply, so I can go on drinking and smoking!"

"I'll never forget how impressed I was, myself and the entire room by the way, the first traveling I saw. On the screen, a face towards us, getting bigger, as if to trag rsenos."

"In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important."

"If someone were to prove to me -- right this minute -- that God, in all his luminousness, exists, it wouldn't change a single aspect of my behavior."

"I'm still an atheist, thank God."

"Like the majority of deaf people, I don't like blind people much."

"In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival."

"One of the great problems of Mexico is taken to the extreme nationalism that betrays a deep inferiority complex."

"One of the greatest tragedies in my life is my deafness, for it's been over twenty years now since I've been able to hear notes. When I listen to music it's as if the letters in a text were changing places with one another, rendering the words unintelligible and muddying the lines. I'd consider my old age redeemed if my hearing were to come back, for music would be the gentlest opiate, calming my fears as I move toward death. In any case, I suppose the only chance I have for that kind of miracle involves nothing short of a visit to Lourdes."

"Salvador Dal¡ seduced many ladies, particularly American ladies, but these seductions usually consisted of stripping them naked in his apartment, frying a couple of eggs, putting them on the woman's shoulders and, without a word, showing them the door."

"Poor workers! First they're cuckolded, and, as if that weren't enough, then they're beaten! Work's a curse, Saturno. I say to hell with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you've heard the call, you've got a vocation --that's ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno --I don't work. And I don't care if they hang me, I won't work! Yet I'm alive! I may live badly, but at least I don't have to work to do it!"

"The bar . . . is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable - and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a client that doesn't like to talk."

"Thank God I'm an atheist."

"Sometimes, watching a movie is a bit like being raped."

"The decline of the aperitif may well be one of the most depressing phenomena of our time."

"Tobacco and alcohol, delicious fathers of abiding friendships and fertile reveries."

"The teacher points the finger at a student and says, Bu¤uel Ref£teme! And it's about two minutes."

"The story is also a sequence of moral and surrealist aesthetic. The sexual instinct and the sense of death form its substance. (The golden age)"

"The bar is for me a place of meditation and contemplation, without which life is inconceivable."

"There, Luis, is formidable, I understood everything! Now it was I who was perplexed. The film told a very simple story, in my view. What was in it so difficult to understand?"

"Very nervous, as you can imagine, I moved behind the screen with a gramophone and, during the screening, Argentine tangos alternated with Tristan and Isolde. I had put some stones in his pocket, to throw at the audience if the film was a failure."

"Today`s culture is unfortunately inseparable from economic and military power. A ruling nation can impose its culture and give a worldwide fame to a second-rate writer like (Ernest Hemingway). (John Steinbeck) is important due to American guns. Had (John Dos Passos) and (William Faulkner) been born in Paraguay or in Turkey, who`d read them?"