There is not one talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not produce but an artificial work could not sustain but a frivolous life.

I'd buy myself a cabin on the beach, I'd put some glue in my navel, and I'd stick a flag in there. Then I'd wait to see which way the wind was blowing.

Being is good, but getting rich is better.... If the gods had only the riches of men's adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula.

I understood, by dint of digging into my memories, that modesty helped me to shine, humility helped me to triumph and virtue to oppress.

The day of my arrest I was first put in a room where there were already several other prisoners, most of them Arabs. They laughed when they saw me. Then they asked what I was in for. I said I'd killed an Arab and they were all silent

One grows out of pity when it's useless.

A stranger to myself and to the world, armed solely with a thought that negates itself as soon as it asserts, what is this condition in which I can have peace only by refusing to know and to live, in which the appetite for conquest bumps into walls that defy its assaults?