To achieve harmony in bad taste is the height of elegance.

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.

Would Hamlet have felt the delicious fascination of suicide if he hadn't had an audience, and lines to speak?

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

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

Anyone who's never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn't know what pleasure is.

Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude