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

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.

So long as man is protected by madness - he functions - and flourishes.

We must suffer to the end, to the moment when we stop believing in suffering.

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.

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?