I'm simply an accident. Why take it all so seriously?

Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher's the poet's equal there.

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.

What necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

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.