Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them.

...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.

I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.