That man has missed something who has never left a brothel at sunrise feeling like throwing himself into the river out of pure disgust.

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

You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.

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.

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

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

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.