“I can't get around this dilemma: I have a horror of troubles, but they whip me up, they make me talented. Peace and well-being, on the contrary, paralyze me. Either be a nobody, or everlastingly plagued.”

“To have a horror of the bourgeois is bourgeois.”

“When I think of all the books still left for me to read, I am certain of further happiness.”

“Literature is an occupation in which you have to keep proving your talent to people who have none”

“I have no religion,’ says Borneau, ‘but I respect the religion of others. Religion is sacred.’ Why this privilege, this immunity?... A believer creates God in his own image; if he is ugly, his God will be morally ugly. Why should moral ugliness be respectable?”

“There are moments when everything goes well; don't be frightened, it won't last.”

“Writing is a way of talking without being interrupted.”