Genius is nothing more or less than childhood recovered by will, a childhood how equipped for self-expression with an adult's capacities.

What is exhilarating in bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of giving offense.

My heart is lost; the beasts have eaten it.

Every healthy man can do without food for two days — but without poetry, never!

The photographic industry was the refuge of all the painters who couldn't make it, either because they had no talent or because they were too lazy to finish their studies. Hence this universal infatuation was not only characterized by blindness and stupidity, but also by vindictiveness.

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject, nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling.