Quotes About Montparnasse

In retrospect, I think those people dressed in costumes walking up Montparnasse must have seen someting before anybody else did. When they looked at me and said, "This guy comes with us," I think it wasn't just an accident, it was as clear a sign as I would ever get that I was going to enter the life of the artist. I was going to disrobe myself, I was going to put on a new identity, I was going to be somebody else.

That was the dream of Montparnasse: to live for the moments of the greatest intensity, to find in them a truthful inspiration, and to hell with all the rest.

went to the cafés at the corner of the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail to be seen publicly and in a way such places anticipated the columnists as the daily substitutes for immortality.

Call me up as soon as you find time to come, or we can meet in Paris and have a talk. Next week almost every afternoon I'm posing for a Russian painter in Montparnasse.

In the last ten days they sold only 9 books, 6 of which were mine. It is trickling along, Eve Adams* still selling a few now and then. Much réclame in Montparnasse. Have to keep away from [Café] Dôme and other places because I am constantly being introduced to jackasses who read the book and whom I don't care to know. [. . .]

When my French side thinks of 'bohemian,' it imagines Montparnasse authors and absinthe - that kind of aesthetic. The American definition might be more tied to American history and culture.

I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris.

I was friends with Susan Sontag the last four years of her life. She had this amazing charisma and so much energy, but she had a sad little funeral in Montparnasse in Paris. It was rainy. It was all wrong. And I was thinking, 'God, she loved life so much.'

A miscreant with coiffed, scented hair, a slender waist, the hips of a woman and the chest of a Prussian officer, with a finely tied cravat, by all girls admired. ~ [introduction of character Montparnasse]