The only people I would care to be with now are artists and people who have suffered: those who know what beauty is, and those who know what sorrow is: nobody else interests me.

Last Evenings on Earth

That's what art is, he said, the story of a life in all its particularity. It's the only thing that really is particular and personal. It's the expression and, at the same time, the fabric of the particular. And what do you mean by the fabric of the particular? I asked, supposing he would answer: Art. I was also thinking, indulgently, that we were pretty drunk already and that it was time to go home. But my friend said: What I mean is the secret story.... The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every damn thing matters! It's just that we don't realize. We tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, we don't even realize that's a lie.

Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.

Neo-Dada

This Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered the ready-mades I sought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my readymades and found aesthetic beauty in them, I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.

Die philosophischen Schriften

If we examine a beautiful picture, obscuring all but a tiny patch of it, more will appear in it, but the more we focus on that small patch the more it appears to be but a confused combination of colors lacking true beauty or artistic conception. Let us then remove the cover and examine the picture from a distance appropriate to its appreciation, and then what seemed but a meaningless blotch upon the canvas is revealed to be a stroke of great artistry done by the work’s author. And as the eyes experience a graphic work, so the ears appreciate a work of music. A great composer may incorporate a dissonant chord with his harmonies with the purpose of stimulating his listener, in a matter of speaking to sting him, so that he becomes engaged with the work and concerned about its resolution to proper order. In a like manner we may appreciate perils or even the experience of evil because of the very fact that they give us a sense of empowerment or indeed ostentation…

Precursors

In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.

Translation

The original is unfaithful to the translation.

Famous Last Words

I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have.

Poems and Problems

Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity.