"Selections from interviews by and with Barnes"

“Well, isn’t Bohemia a place where everyone is as good as everyone else — and must not a waiter be a little less than a waiter to be a good Bohemian?”

“A man is whole only when he takes into account his shadow as well as himself — and what is a man's shadow but his upright astonishment?”

“I’m a fart in a gale of wind, a humble violet, under a cow pat.”

“A strong sense of identity gives man an idea he can do no wrong; too little accomplishes the same.”

“Morbid? You make me laugh. This life I write and draw and portray is life as it is, and therefore you call it morbid. Look at my life. Look at the life around me. Where is this beauty that I am supposed to miss? The nice episodes that others depict? Is not everything morbid? I mean the life of people stripped of their masks. Where are the relieving features? Often I sit down to work at my drawing board, at my typewriter. All of a sudden my joy is gone. I feel tired of it all because, I think, "What's the use?" Today we are, tomorrow dead. We are born and don't know why. We live and suffer and strive, envious or envied. We love, we hate, we work, we admire, we despise. … Why? And we die, and no one will ever know that we have been born.”

“Of course I think of the past and of Paris, what else is there to remember?”