it was odd, he thought, that a man could hate himself as though he were someone else.

Night is falling: at dusk, you must have good eyesight to be able to tell the Good Lord from the Devil.

I consider Les Nourritures Terrestres as a frightening book: "Look for God in no other place than everywhere." Go and tell that to a workman, an engineer!

The lad who dreams of being a boxing champion or an admiral chooses reality. If the writer chooses the imaginary, he confuses the two.

Words There is no good father, that's the rule. Don't lay the blame on men but on the bond of paternity, which is rotten. To beget children, nothing better; to have them, what iniquity!

What I see is teeming cohesion, contained dispersal... For him, to sculpt is to take the fat off space.

That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without the sense of thirst.