Everything really desirable has come about because of, or in spite of, wine!

All culture corrupts, but French culture corrupts absolutely.

Very few people realise that sex is a psychic and not a physical act. The clumsy coupling of human beings is simply a biological paraphrase of this truth - a primitive method of introducing minds to each other, engaging them. But most people are stuck in the physical aspect, unaware of the poetic rapport which it so clumsily tries to teach.

The effective in art is what rapes the emotions of your audience without nourishing its values.

after all the work of the philosophers on his soul and the doctors on his body, what can we really say we know about a man? That he is, when all is said and done, just a passage for liquids and solids, a pipe of flesh.

They say that if you get bored enough with calamity you can learn to laugh.

It’s only with great vulgarity that you can achieve real refinement, only out of bawdry that you can get tenderness.