“I speak to the paper, as I speak to the first person I meet.”

“If I speak of myself in different ways, that is because I look at myself in different ways.”

“If ordinary people complain that I speak too much of myself, I complain that they do not even think of themselves.”

“No one is exempt from speaking nonsense. The great misfortune is to do it solemnly.”

“I have not seen anywhere in the world a more obvious malformed person and miracle than myself. Through use and time we become conditioned to anything strange; but the more I become familiar with and know myself, the more my deformity amazes me and the less I understand myself.”

“Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.”

“To censure my own faults in some other person seems to me no more incongruous than to censure, as I often do, another's in myself. They must be denounced everywhere, and be allowed no place of sanctuary.”