What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

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

To defy heredity is to defy billions of years, to defy the first cell

We derive our vitality from our store of madness.

If you're unlucky enough not to have alcoholic parents, it takes you a whole lifetime of intoxication to overcome the dead weight of their virtues.

The task of the solitary man is to be even more solitary.

How important can it be that I suffer and think? My presence in this world will disturb a few tranquil lives and will unsettle the unconscious and pleasant naiveté of others. Although I feel that my tragedy is the greatest in history - greater than the fall of empires - I am nevertheless aware of my total insignificance. I am absolutely persuaded that I am nothing in this universe; yet I feel that mine is the only real existence.