“When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.”

“These studies are the result of my attempt to extract the essence of literature. Literature is either the essential or nothing. I believe that the Evil—an acute form of Evil—which it expresses, has a sovereign value for us. But this concept does not exclude morality: on the contrary, it demands a 'hypermorality.'Literature is communication. Communication requires loyalty. A rigorous morality results from complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication.—Literature and Evil”

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”

“...out of despair I decided to follow this horror through. I stared down at what I was already grasping in my hand, like an ape; I wrapped myself in the dust and took off my trousers.Interwoven joy and terror strangled me within. I strangled and I gasped from pleasure. The more those pictures terrified me, the more intense was my excitement at the sight of them. After days of accumulating alarms, tensions, suffocations, I was beyond withstanding my own ignominy. I invoked it and I blessed it. It was my inevitable fate: my joy was all the greater since, with regard to life, I had long since entrenched myself in an attitude of suffering, and now, in the throes of delight, I progressed even farther into vileness and degradation.”

“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.”

“And, writing to you, I know that I cannot speak to you, but there is no way of preventing myself from speaking. I am going abroad, as far away as possible, but everywhere I go I shall be in the same delirium, the same whether far from you or near, for the pleasure in me depends on no one, it emanates from me alone, from the imbalance in me which perpetually frays my nerves. You can see it for yourself, you aren’t the cause of it, I can do without you and I want you at a distance from me, but if you are involved, if it be a question of you, then I want to be in this delirium, I want you to behold it, I want it to destroy you.”

“My stupidity gave its blessing to succouring nature, on her knees before God.What I am (my drunken laughter and happiness) is nonetheless at stake, handed over to chance, thrown out into the night, chased away like a dog.The wind of truth responded like a slap to piety’s extended cheek.The heart is human to the extent that it rebels (this means: to be a man is ‘not to bow down before the law’).A poet doesn’t justify — he doesn’t accept — nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry.When to accept poetry changes it into its opposite (it becomes the mediator of an acceptance!) I hold back the leap in which I would exceed the universe, I justify the given world, I content myself with it”