Writing this book I am like a man playing the piano with lead balls attached to his knuckles.
Melancholy is a sensual pleasure that is deliberately provoked. How many people shut themselves away to make themselves sadder, or to weep beside a stream, or choose a sentimental book! We are constantly building and unbuilding ourselves.
May I die like a dog rather than hasten the ripening of a sentence by a single second!
That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.
Boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.
Me and my books in the same apartment, like a gherkin in its vinegar.
Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.
You can’t find the soul with a scalpel.
The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.
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.
Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.
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.