We don't have the time to completely be ourselves. We only have the room to be happy.

I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.

God is not necessary to create culpability, or to punish. Our fellow men are enough for that, helped by ourselves.

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.