“There is in every madmana misunderstood geniuswhose ideashining in his headfrightened peopleand for whom delirium was the only solutionto the strangulationthat life had prepared for him.”

“I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born.”

“The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.”

“I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang myself because I was aware that I could not slit his throat.”

“When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.”

“And war is wonderful, isn't it?For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step.In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides.”

“All writing is rubbish. People who try to free themselves from what is vague in order to state precisely whatever is going on in their minds are producing rubbish. The whole literary tribe is a pack of rubbish mongers, especially today. All those who have landmarks in their minds, I mean in a certain part of their heads, in well-defined sites in their skulls, all those who are masters of language, all those for whom words have meaning, all those for whom the soul has its heights and thought its currents, those who are the spirits of the times, and who have given names to these currents of thought—I am thinking of their specific tasks, and of that mechanical creaking their minds produce at every gust of wind—are rubbish mongers.”