Serious literature does not exist to make life easy but to complicate it.

Man is profoundly dependent on the reflection of himself in another man's soul, be it even the soul of an idiot.

Great poetry must be admired, because it is great and because it is poetry, and so we admire it.

You are ugly when you love her, you are beautiful and fresh, vital and free, modern and poetic when you don't... you are more beautiful as an orphan than as your mother's son.

Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre.

Wherever I see some mystique, be it virtue or family, faith or fatherland, there I must commit some indecent act.

It is in the prime of youth that man sinks into empty phrases and grimaces. It's in this smithy that our maturity is forged.