The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.

But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.

I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.

May heaven protect us, cher monsieur, from being set on a pedestal by our friends!!!

Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.

Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.

The Byronic hero, incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love, suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive action.