But a man's beauty represents inner, functional truths: his face shows what he can do.

Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.

I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L'Illustration. Something desperate, you know.

There's the risk of being loved...and that would keep me from being happy.

Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence

What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.

Women naturally prefer their ideas to their sensations.

There is something divine in mindless beauty, and Mersault was particularly responsive to it.

The world is always satisfied, it turns out, with countenance it can understand. Indolence and cowardice do the rest. Independence is earned by a few words of cheap confidence.

...he was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way...

Their pleasures are fierce and their sleep impenetrable. And they know that the body has a soul in which the soul has no part.

I have a fantastic relationship with money. I use it to buy my freedom.

I think there's a natural system in your own head about how much violence the scene warrants. It's not an intellectual process, it's an instinctive process.

My favourite subjects at school were algebra and logic: making a big problem into something small.

All pleasure should be a little bent, don't you think?

The more we talk about the past, the less we heal from it.

India's had two groovy moments. Once when the Beatles went to India and now when Madonna has embraced yoga.

Failure is a stepping-stone to greatness.

A man who can't read only knows what other folks tell him.

I doubt if you get another Wu-Tang Clan. That might be harder than getting the new Jackson Five