“When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.”

“Poor people never, or hardly ever, ask for an explanation of all they have to put up with. They hate one another, and content themselves with that.”

“The worst part is wondering how you’ll find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you’ll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows. And maybe it’s treacherous old age coming on, threatening the worst. Not much music left inside us for life to dance to. Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.”

“People avenge themselves for the favors done them.”

“It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.”

“An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time. ”

“Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.”