There's a point of poverty at which the spirit isn't with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it's almost as if you were talking to the soul itself. And a soul's not properly responsible.

Only a complete alcoholic can think life is funny ... any life!.

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

Philosophizing is simply one way of being afraid, a cowardly pretense that doesn't get you anywhere.

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.

When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.

In the kitchens of love, after all, vice is like the pepper in a good sauce; it brings out the flavor, it’s indispensable.