Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart's drama and the negative meaning of history.

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

Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.

The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty-the sideshow of second thoughts-is his rule; he offers himself.

Write books only if you are going to say in them the things you would never dare confide to anyone.

In the hours without sleep, each moment is so full and so vacant that it suggests itself as a rival of Time.

True moral elegance consists in the art of disguising one's victories as defeats.