Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away.

For only that which we knew and practiced at age 15 will one day constitute our attraction. And one thing, therefore, can never be made good: having neglected to run away from home.

Rather than ask, What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time? I should like to ask, What is its position in them.

Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.

Melancholy betrays the world for the sake of knowledge. But in its tenacious self-absorption it embraces dead objects in its contemplation, in order to redeem them

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

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.