“When I wrote to him, I wanted my letters to be sprightly, trivial, indifferent. In spite of myself, I imbued them with my love. I would have liked to make it seem powerful, sure of itself and sure of me, but I infused it, despite myself, with all my anxiety.”

“I wanted to swallow myself by opening my mouth very wide and turning it over my head so that it would take in my whole body, and then the Universe, until all that would remain of me would be a ball of eaten thing which little by little would be annihilated: that is how I see the end of the world.”

“When I beheld you, suddenly - for perhaps a second - I had the strength to reject everything that wasn't you and to laugh at the illusion. But my shoulders are very frail. I was unable to bear the weight of the world's condemnation. And I began to hate you when everything about you would have kindled my love and when love would have made men's contempt unbearable, and their contempt would have made my love unbearable. The fact is, I hate you.”

“A few words which he wanted to emphasize were put into brackets or set off by quotation marks. My first impulse was to point out to him that it was ridiculous to put slang words and expressions between quotation marks, for that prevents them from entering the language. But I decided not to. When I received his letters, his parentheses made me shudder. At first, it was a shudder of slight shame, disagreeable. Later (and now, when I reread them) the shudder was the same, but I know, by some indefinable, imperceptible change, that it is a shudder of love- it is both poignant and delightful, perhaps because of the memory of the word shame that accompanied it in the beginning. Those parentheses and quotation marks are the flaw on the hip, the beauty mark on the thigh whereby my friend showed that he was himself, irreplaceable, and that he was wounded.”

“I want to fulfill myself in one of the rarest of destinies. I have only a dim notion of what it 
will be. I want it to have not a graceful curve slightly bent toward evening but a hitherto unseen beauty 
lovely because of the danger which works away at it overwhelms it undermines it. Oh let me be only utter
 beauty I shall go quickly or slowly but I shall dare what must be dared. I shall destroy appearances the 
casings will burn away and one evening I shall appear there in the palm of your hand quiet and pure like a
 glass statuette. You will see me. Round about me there will be nothing left.”

“...the characters in my books all resemble each other. They live, with minor variations, the same moments, the same perils, and when I speak of them, my language, which is inspired by them, repeats the same poems in the same tone.”

“It was the first time I saw the look on the face of the people I robbed: it was ugly. I was the cause of such ugliness, and the only thing that made me feel was a cruel pleasure which, I thought, was bound to transfigure my own face, to make me resplendent. I was then 23 years old. From that moment on, I felt capable of advancing in cruelty.”