"One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels."

"Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer."

"You don't make art out of good intentions."

"Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it."

"Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science now accomplishes for all men."

"What wretched poverty of language! To compare stars to diamonds!"

"He seriously thought that there is less harm in killing a man than producing a child: in the first case you are relieving someone of life, not his whole life but a half or a quarter or a hundredth part of that existence that is going to finish, that would finish without you; but as for the second, he would say, are you not responsible to him for all the tears he will shed, from the cradle to the grave? Without you he would never have been born, and why is he born? For your amusement, not for his, that's for sure; to carry your name, the name of a fool, I'll be bound " you may as well write that name on some wall; why do you need a man to bear the burden of three or four letters?"

"Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness."

"The truth is that fullness of soul can sometimes overflow in utter vapidity of language, for none of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."

"But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted."

"Maybe happiness too is a metaphor invented on a day of boredom."

"Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?"

"Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work."

"Some details escaped her, but the regret remained with her."

"When will someone write from the point of view of a joke, that is to say theway God sees events from above?"

"I invite all brats to throw their cookies at the baker's head if they're not sweet, winos to chuck their wine if it's bad, the dying to shuck their souls when they croak, and men to throw their existence in God's face when it's bitter."

"At other times, at the edge of a wood, especially at dusk, the trees themselves would assume strange shapes: sometimes they were arms rising heavenwards, , or else the trunk would twist and turn like a body being bent by the wind. At night, when I woke up and the moon and the stars were out, I would see in the sky things that filled me simultaneously with dread and longing. I remember that once, one Christmas Eve, I saw a great naked women, standing erect, with rolling eyes; she must have been a hundred feet high, but along she drifted, growing ever longer and ever thinner, and finally fell apart, each limb remaining separate, with the head floating away first as the rest of her body continued to waver."

"The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature."

"Thought is the greatest of pleasures -pleasure itself is only imagination-have you ever enjoyed anything more than your dreams?"

"People believe a little too easily that the function of the sun is to help the cabbages along."

"The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded."

"Contact with the world, with which I have been steadily rubbing shoulders now for fourteen months, makes me feel more and more like returning to my shell. I hate the crowd, the herd. It seems to me always atrociously stupid or vile."

"I can't admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, which prove to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in turpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them."

"What a man Balzac would have been if he had known how to write."

"Abstraction can provide stumbling blocks for people of strange intelligence."

"One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes."

"I grew up in a hospital and as a child I played in the dissecting room."

"Idols must never be touched: the gilt will come off on our hands."

"I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity."

"I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests."

"The future is the worst thing about the present."

"I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen."

"This haze of blood must subside, the palace must collapse under the weight of the riches it conceals, the orgy must finish and the time come to awaken."

"Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work."

"I am an obscure and patient pearl-fisherman who dives into the deepest waters and comes up with empty hands and a blue face. Some fatal attraction draws me down into the abysses of thought, down into those innermost recesses which never cease to fascinate the strong. I shall spend my life gazing at the ocean of art, where others voyage or fight; and from time to time I'll entertain myself by diving for those green and yellow shells that nobody will want. So I shall keep them for myself and cover the walls of my hut with them."

"The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties, all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame."

"And she felt as though she had been there, on that bench, for an eternity. For an infinity of passion can be contained in one minute, like a crowd in a small space."

"When you reduce a woman to writing, she makes you think of a thousand other women."

"Every notary carries about inside him the debris of a poet."

"And the more he was irritated by her basic personality, the more he was drawn to her by a harsh, bestial sensuality, illusions of a moment, which ended in hate."

"Of all the icy blasts that blow on love, a request for money is the most chilling."

"She wanted to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desires of her heart, being of a temperament more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions, not landscapes."

"Deep in her soul, however, she was waiting for something to happen. Like a sailor in distress, she would gaze out over the solitude of her life with desperate eyes, seeking some white sail in the mists of the far-off horizon. She did not know what this chance event would be, what wind would drive it to her, what shore it would carry her to, whether it was a longboat or a three-decked vessel, loaded with anguish or filled with happiness up to the portholes. But each morning, when she awoke, she hoped it would arrive that day, and she would listen to every sound, spring to her feet, feel surprised that it had not come; then at sunset, always more sorrowful, she would wish the next day were already there."

"One thinks of nothing,' he continued; 'the hours slip by. Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blinding with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures. It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes."

"Just when the gods had ceased to be, and the Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius, when man stood alone."

"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything."

"What better occupation, really, than to spend the evening at the fireside with a book, with the wind beating on the windows and the lamp burning bright...Haven't you ever happened to come across in a book some vague notion that you've had, some obscure idea that returns from afar and that seems to express completely your most subtle feelings?"

"Self-confidence depends on environment: one does not speak in the same tone in the drawing room than in the kitchen."

"The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest."

"Let us not kid ourselves; let us remember that literature is of no use whatever, except in the very special case of somebody's wishing to become, of all things, a Professor of Literature."