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.

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Some cry: 'Love me!!' Others: 'Don't love me!!' But a certain genus, the worst and most unhappy, cries: 'Don't love me and be faithful to me!!'

Mistakes are joyful, truth infernal.

Men like us are good and proud and strong...if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses.

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents

I was tormented by my desire for a woman ... I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their faces and crowded with my desires.