Each concession we make is accompanied by an inner diminution of which we are not immediately conscious.

Whenever I happen to be in a city of any size, I marvel that riots do not break out everyday: Massacres, unspeakable carnage, a doomsday chaos. How can so many human beings coexist in a space so confined without hating each other to death?

Democracy: a festival of mediocrity.

What are you waiting for in order to give up?

No one recovers from the disease of being born, a deadly wound if there ever was one.

To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?

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.