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

“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.”

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

“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?”

“L' amour est comme un sablier, avec le coeur remplir le vide du cerveau”

“If money does not make you happy, give it back”

“N'écoutant que son courage, qui ne lui disait rien, il se garda bien d'intervenir”