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?

One can experience loneliness in two ways: by feeling lonely in the world or by feeling the loneliness of the world.

What music appeals to in us it is difficult to know; what we do know is that music reaches a zone so deep that madness itself cannot penetrate there.

Only one endowed with restless vitality is susceptible to pessimism. You become a pessimist-a demonic, elemental, bestial pessimist-only when life has been defeated many times in its fight against depression.

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

In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.

Imaginary pains are by far the most real we suffer, since we feel a constant need for them and invent them because there is no way of doing without them.