I live only because it is in my power to die when I choose to: without the idea of suicide, I'd have killed myself right away.

The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep. Why call him a rational animal when other animals are equally reasonable? But there is not another animal in the entire creation that wants to sleep yet cannot.

Lucidity's task: to attain a correct despair, an Olympian ferocity.

Our works, whatever they may be, derive from our incapacity to kill or to kill ourselves.

All great ideas should be followed by an exclamation mark - a warning signal similar to the skull and crossbones drawn on high-voltage transformers.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

Wisdom disguises our wounds; it teaches us how to bleed in secret.