If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.

Melancholy: an appetite no misery satisfies.

To live entirely without a goal! I have glimpsed this state, and have often attained it, without managing to remain there: I am too weak for such happiness.

I would like to explode, flow, crumble into dust, and my disintegration would be my masterpiece.

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?

A civilization is destroyed only when its gods are destroyed.

The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.