The end of lower art is to please, the end of average art is to raise the top, the end of superior art is to free.

Wasting time has an esthetics to it.

Success consists in being successful, not in having potential for success. Any wide piece of ground is the potential site of a palace, but there's no palace till it's built.

Literature exists because the world isn't enough.

Life is whatever we conceive it to be.

There are no norms. All people are exceptions to a rule that doesn’t exist.

That is my morality or my metaphysics or me myself: a passer-by in everything, even my own soul. I belong to nothing, I desire nothing, I am nothing except an abstract centre of impersonal sensations, a sentient mirror fallen from the wall but still turned to reflect the diversity of the world.