Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

The destructive character lives from the feeling, not that life is worth living, but that suicide is not worth the trouble.

There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.

Bourgeois existence is the regime of private affairs . . . and the family is the rotten, dismal edifice in whose closets and crannies the most ignominious instincts are deposited. Mundane life proclaims the total subjugation of eroticism to privacy.

Those who do not learn how to decipher photographs will be the illiterate of the future.

How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!