Insomnia is a vertiginous lucidity that can convert paradise itself into a place of torture.
If, at the limit, you can rule without crime, you cannot do so without injustices.
The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.
Every form of talent involves a certain shameless-ness.
What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?
The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.
We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.
Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.
There is not much difference between a mortal man and a dying man. The absurdity of making plans is only slightly more obvious in the second case.
If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.
To exist is a habit I do not despair of acquiring.
One doesn’t live in a country, one lives in a language.
We are all geniuses when we dream.
My mission is to see things as they are. Exactly contrary of a mission.
A man who fears ridicule will never go far, for good or ill: he remains on this side of this talents, and even if he has genius, he is doomed to mediocrity.
Consciousness is nature’s nightmare.
Existing is plagiarism.
Man started out on the wrong foot. The misadventure in paradise was the first consequence. The rest had to follow.
I would like to go mad on one condition, namely, that I would become a happy madman, lively and always in a good mood, without any troubles and obsessions, laughing senselessly from morning to night.
Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.