No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

I have no nationality - the best possible status for an intellectual.

Where are my sensations? They have melted into... me, and what is this me, this self, but the sum of these evaporated sensations?

Crime in full glory consolidates authority by the sacred fear it inspires.

The desire to die was my one and only concern; to it I have sacrificed everything, even death.

Read day and night, devour books - these sleeping pills - not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.

Self-conscious rejection of the absolute is the best way to resist God; thus illusion, the substance of life, is saved.