I've always rejected being understood. To be understood is to prostitute oneself. I prefer to be taken seriously for what I'm not, remaining humanly unknown, with naturalness and all due respect

Tomorrow I too – this feeling and thinking soul, the universe I am to myself – yes, tomorrow I too will be someone who no longer walks these streets, someone others will evoke with a vague: 'I wonder what's become of him?” And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience, will be just one less passer-by on the daily streets of some city or other.

The essence of what I desire is simply this: to sleep away life.

Never having discovered qualities in myself which could attract someone else, I could never believe that anyone felt attracted to me.

We almost always live outside ourselves, and life itself is a continual dispersion. But it's towards ourselves that we tend, as towards a centre around which, like planets, we trace absurd and distant ellipses.

Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.

I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.