A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.
Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.
As for the piano, the faster her fingers flew over it, the more he marveled. She struck the keys with aplomb and ran from one end of the keyboard to the other without a stop.
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
Axiome: la haine du bourgeois est le commencement de la vertu. Axiom: Hatred of the bourgeois is the beginning of wisdom.
What stops me from taking myself seriously, even though I am essentially a serious person, is that I find myself extremely ridiculous, not in the sense of the small-scale ridiculousness of slap-stick comedy, but rather in the sense of ridiculousness that seems intrinsic to human life and that manifests itself in the simplest actions and the most extraordinary gestures.
You don’t make art out of good intentions.
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.
Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.
Everyone became brave from excess of terror.
I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.
The idea of bringing someone into the world fills me with horror. I would curse myself if I were a father. A son of mine! Oh no, no, no! May my entire flesh perish and may I transmit to no one the aggravations and the disgrace of existence.
Everything which one invents is true, be sure of it.
My kingdom is as wide as the universe and my wants have no limits. I go forward always, freeing spirits and weighing words, without fear, without compassion, without love, without God. I am called science.
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.
Sentences must stir in a book like leaves in a forest, each distinct from each despite their resemblance.
I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
Women want you to deceive them: they force you to, and if you resist, they blame you.
You'll always have to deal with bastards, being lied to, deceived, slandered and ridiculed, but that's to be expected and you must thank heaven when you meet the exception.
Writing is a dog's life, but the only life worth living.
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