We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.

Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude.

The chaos of the mind cannot constitute a reply to the providence of the universe. All it can be is an awakening in the night, where all that can be heard is anguished poetry let loose.

Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.

Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.

The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind . . . From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.

Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.