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

“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.”

“the important people in our lives leave imprints. they may die or go in the physical realm, but they are always there in your heart, because they helped form your heart”

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

“There are places and moments in which one is so completely alone that one sees the world entire.”

“Posterity! Why should people be less stupid tomorrow than they are today?”

“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?”