Tragedy is clean, it is restful, it is flawless.

What fun it would be to be poor, as long as one was excessively poor! Anything in excess is most exhilarating

Listen, my friend, there are two races of beings. The masses teeming and happy - common clay, if you like - eating, breeding, working, counting their pennies; people who just live; ordinary people; people you can't imagine dead. And then there are the others - the noble ones, the heroes. The ones you can quite well imagine lying shot, pale and tragic; one minute triumphant with a guard of honor, and the next being marched away between two gendarmes

The object of art is to give life shape.

With God, what is terrible is that one never knows whether it's not just a trick of the devil.

Believe me; all evil comes from the old. They grow fat on ideas and young men die of them.

To say yes, you have to sweat and roll up your sleeves and plunge both hands into life up to the elbows. It is easy to say no, even if saying no means death.