What I would like to write is a book about nothing, a book without exterior attachments, which would be held together by the innerforce of its style, as the earth without support is held in the air – a book that would have almost no subject or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible.
To see one’s name in print! Some people commit a crime for no other reason.
Tout ce qu’on invente est vrai, soi-en sure. La poesie est une chose aussi precise que la geometrie.
What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.
On spinach: I dislike it, and am happy to dislike it because if I liked it I would eat it, and I cannot stand it.
Each dream finds at last its form; there is a drink for every thirst, and love for every heart. And there is no better way to spend your life than in the unceasing preoccupation of an idea – of an ideal.
Art is nothing without form.
I do not like to “interest” the public with myself.
Once one has kissed a cadaver’s forehead, there always remains something of it on the lips, an infinite bitterness, an aftertasteof nothingness that nothing can erase.
Criticism occupies the lowest place in the literary hierarchy: as regards form, almost always; and as regards moral value, incontestably. It comes after rhyming games and acrostics, which at least require a certain inventiveness.
The style, which is something I take to heart, is getting on my nerves horribly. It frustrates and torments me. I have days when Iam sick about it and nights when it gives me a fever. The more I go at it the more I find myself incapable of conveying the Idea.
And so I will take back up my poor life, so plain and so tranquil, where phrases are adventures and the only flowers I gather aremetaphors.
Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.
I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
Do not read as children do to enjoy themselves, or, as the ambitious do to educate themselves. No, read to live.
I love the autumn – that melancholy season that suits memories so well. When the trees have lost their leaves, when the sky at sunset still preserves the russet hue that fills with gold the withered grass, it is sweet to watch the final fading of the fires that until recently burnt within you.
While there’s life there’s hope.
One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.
But she – her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weaving its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
There is always after the death of anyone a kind of stupefaction; so difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign ourselves to believe in it.