And over your unconsecrated head you'll hear the howling wolves lament their fate and yours the livelong year.

Multitude, solitude: equal and interchangeable terms for the active and prolific poet.

Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation.

A study of the Great Malady; horror of home.

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

Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

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.