To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose.

With two thousand years of Christianity behind him... a man can't see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.

They came from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and stopped here. They couldn’t go any futrther because of the ocean. That’s France, that’s the French people.

Well, you know... experience is a muffled lantern that throws light only on the bearer...it's incommunicable.

Most people die at the last minute; others twenty years beforehand, some even earlier. They are the wretched of the earth.

I was a hundred-percent sick, I felt as if I had no further use for my legs, they just hung over the edge of my bed like unimportant and rather ridiculous objects.

All that makes a lunatic are the very ordinary ideas of mankind shut up inside a man's head.