I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

I took Eugene Sue's Arthur from the reading-room. It's indescribable, enough to make you vomit. You have to read this to realize the pitifulness of money, success, and the public. Literature has become consumptive. It spits and slobbers, covers its blisters with salve and sticking-plaster, and has grown bald from too much hair-slicking. It would take Christ of art to cure this leper.

She was as sated with him as he was tired of her. Emma had rediscovered in adultery all the banality of marriage.

She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.

It is always sad to leave a place to which one knows one will never return.