[W]hat necessity impels a writer who has produced fifty books to write still one more? Why this proliferation, this fear of being forgotten, this debased coquetry?

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Anyone can escape into sleep, we are all geniuses when we dream, the butcher’s the poet’s equal there.

Boredom dismantles the mind, renders it superficial, out at the seams, saps it from within and dislocates it.

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Discretion is deadly to genius; ruinous to talent.

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Every form of talent involves a certain shamelessness.

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If you lack the power to demoralize yourself along with the age, to go as low and as far, do not complain of being misunderstood by it.

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The literary man? An indiscreet man, who devaluates his miseries, divulges them, tells them like so many beads: immodesty—the sideshow of second thoughts—is his rule; he offers himself.

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the one that inspires all his deeds and designs, he would say, “I want to be praised.”

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The wise man, the sage, is hostile to the new. Disabused, he abdicates: that is his form of protest.

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To write books is to have a certain relation with original sin. For what is a book if not a loss of innocence, an act of aggression, a repetition of our Fall?