The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

I'm absolutely removed from the world at such times...The hours go by without my knowing it. Sitting there I'm wandering in countries I can see every detail of - I'm playing a role in the story I'm reading. I actually feel I'm the characters - I live and breath with them.

Be orderly and disciplined in daily life, like a good bourgeois, so that I might be wild and violent in my art.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming an idiot oneself.

He had the vanity to believe men did not like him – while men simply did not know him.