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

The crowd is the veil through which the familiar city beckons to the flâneur as phantasmagoria-now a landscape, now a room.

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.

All the decisive blows are struck left-handed.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original.

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

The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself.