Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.

Like those great sphinxes lounging through eternity in noble attitudes upon the desert sand, they gaze incuriously at nothing, calm and wise.

In literature as in ethics, there is danger, as well as glory, in being subtle. Aristocracy isolates us.

And, drunk with my own madness, I shouted at him furiously, "Make life beautiful! Make life beautiful!

Even as a child I felt in my heart two opposite emotions: the horror of life and the ecstasy of life.

From that moment onwards, our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate. A form of lunacy, an extraordinary fanaticism took hold of these new sun-worshippers.

It is from the womb of art that criticism was born.