We know that their adventures are childish. They themselves are fools. They are ready to kill or be killed over a card-game in which an opponent - or they themselves - was cheating. Yet, thanks to such fellows, tragedies are possible.

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

Betrayal is beautiful.

Anyone who hasn't experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

They remain dead, the people I try to resuscitate by straining to hear what they say. But the illusion is not pointless, or not quite, even if the reader knows all this better than I do. One thing a book tries to do, beneath the disguise of words and causes and clothes and grief, is show the skeleton and the skeleton dust to come. The author too, like those of whom he speaks, is dead.

It's a true image, born of a false spectacle.