The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.

One's existence should be in two parts: one should live like a bourgeois and think like a demigod.

I am finding it very hard to get my novel started. I suffer from stylistic abscesses; and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.

Exuberance is better than taste.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.