If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.

But some day sooner or later our passion would have cooled - inevitably - it's the way with everything human.

Writing history is like drinking an ocean and pissing a cupful.

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real.

Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art.

Success as I see it is a result, not a goal.

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.