“To win the guilty kiss of a saint, I'd welcome the plague as a blessing.”

“I dream of an ideal confessor to tell everything to, spill it all: I dream of a blasé saint.”

“It is no sign of benediction to have been obsessed with the lives of saints, for it is an obsession intertwined with a taste for maladies and hunger for depravities. One only troubles oneself with saints because one has been disappointed by the paradoxes of earthly life; one therefore searches out other paradoxes, more outlandish in guise, redolent of unknown truths, unknown perfumes...”

“A harmonious being cannot believe in God. Saints, criminals, and paupers have launched him, making him available to all unhappy people.”

“If truth were not boring, science would have done away with God long ago. But God as well as the saints is a means to escape the dull banality of truth.”

“If a man has not, by the time he is thirty, yielded to the fascination of every form of extremism—I don't know whether he is to be admired or scorned, regarded as a saint or a corpse.”

“Shakespeare et Dostoievski font persister en vous le regret de n'etre pas un saint ou un criminel. Ces deux manieres de s'autodetruire...”