He always ran away from the battle with himself. Even in his own heart's privacy, he excused himself, saying, "If she hadn't said so-and-so, it would never have happened.

I am convinced that the air we normally breathe is a kind of water, and men and women are a species of fish.

I can't bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

The old ideals are dead as nails--nothing there. It seems to me there remains only this perfect union with a woman--sort of ultimate marriage--and there isn't anything else.

Sentimentalism is the working off on yourself of feelings you haven't really got.

He who gets nearer the sun is leader, the aristocrat of aristocrats, or he who, like Dostoevsky, gets nearest the moon of our non-being.

Satire exists for the purpose of killing the social being [for the sake of] the true individual, the real human being.