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.

The writer must wade into life as into the sea, but only up to the navel.

You can't find the soul with a scalpel.

Prose is like hair; it shines with combing.

The public wants work which flatters its illusions.

What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.