Mediocrity is more dangerous in a critic than in a writer.

I long for solitude and yet I cannot stand it.

The human comedy does not attract me enough. I am not entirely of this world. I am from elsewhere, and it is worth finding this elsewhere beyond the walls...but where is it?

You've always made the mistake of being yourself.

I have no other pictures of the world apart from those which express evanescence, and callousness, vanity and anger, emptiness, orhideous useless hate. Everything has merely confirmed what I had seen and understood in my childhood: futile and sordid fits of rage, cries suddenly blanketed by the silence, shadows swallowed up for ever by the night.

The Arts are man's most useless ... and essential ... activity.

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.