The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

There is no truth. There is only perception.

Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

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.