You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.

The morality of art is in its very beauty.

One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.

What is glory? It is to have a lot of nonsense talked about you.

Stupidity consists in wanting to reach conclusions. We are a thread, and we want to know the whole cloth.