I didn't go to the lectures. My valet, who was more distinguished than I, went instead.

If he [the Artist] were to take up the pen it would be...to better express his individuality and explain it to others; or else to put his internal affairs in order...to deepen and sharpen his relationship with his fellow men because other souls exert an immense and creative influence on our soul; or to try to fight for a world as he would like it to be, for a world that is indispensable to his life.

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.

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

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

I am reading Sienkiewicz. What tormenting reading. What a powerful genius! And there never was such a first-rate writer of the second-rate class.

I am a collection of the family's body parts.