We die in proportion to the words we fling around us.

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

Torment, for some men, is a need, an appetite, and an accomplishment.

To possess a high degree of consciousness, to be always aware of yourself in relation to the world, to live in the permanent tension of knowledge, means to be lost for life.

If we manage to last in spite of everything, it is because our infirmities are so many and so contradictory that they cancel each other out.

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

In order to have the stuff of a tyrant, a certain mental derangement is necessary.