Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom.
I don’t believe that happiness is possible, but I think tranquility is.
Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling.
What seems to me the highest and the most difficult achievement of Art is not to make us laugh or cry, or to rouse our lust or our anger, but to do as nature does-that is, fill us with wonderment.
I go from exasperation to a state of collapse, then I recover and go from prostration to Fury, so that my average state is one of being annoyed.
A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
I have dreamed much and have done very little.
But the most wretched thing, is it not-is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.
A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.
Beautiful things spoil nothing.
Isn’t ‘not to be bored’ one of the principal goals of life?
Come, let’s be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.
Love, to her, was something hat comes suddenly, like a blinding flash of lightening – a heaven-sent storm hurled into life, uprooting it, sweeping every will before it like a leaf, engulfing all feelings.
He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.
There comes a point at which you stop writing and think all the more.
I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?
One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.
In my view, the novelist has no right to express his opinions on the things of this world. In creating, he must imitate God: do his job and then shut up.