Michel Leiris Quotes

3 Sourced Quotes

Nothing seems more like a whorehouse to me than a museum. In it you find the same equivocal aspect, the same frozen quality.

Michel Leiris

Dream is not a revelation. If a dream affords the dreamer some light on himself, it is not the person with closed eyes who makes the discovery but the person with open eyes lucid enough to fit thoughts together. Dream – a scintillating mirage surrounded by shadows – is essentially poetry.

Michel Leiris

I am imbued with the notion that a Muse is necessarily a dead woman, inaccessible or absent; that a poetic structure - like the canon, which is only a hole surrounded by steel - can be based only on what one does not have; and that ultimately one can write only to fill a void or at the least to situate, in relation to the most lucid part of ourselves, the place where this incommensurable abyss yawns within us.

Michel Leiris

Michel Leiris

Michel Leiris

Creative Commons

Born: April 20, 1901

Died: September 30, 1990 (aged 89)

Bio: Julien Michel Leiris was a French surrealist writer and ethnographer.

Known for:

L' Afrique fantôme (1934)
Francis Bacon (1983)
Manhood (1963)
Nights as day, days as night (1987)
Mirror of Tauromachy

Michel Leiris on Wikipedia

Suggest an edit or a new quote

French Anthropologist Quotes

Anthropologist Quotes

20th-century Anthropologist Quotes