Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

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

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

A man is a critic when he cannot be an artist, in the same way that a man becomes an informer when he cannot be a soldier.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

I am alone on this road strewn with bones and bordered by ruins! Angels have their brothers, and demons have their infernal companions. Yet I have but the sound of my scythe when it harvests, my whistling arrows, my galloping horse. Always the sound of the same wave eating away at the world

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