Progress is the injustice each generation commits with regard to its predecessors.

The universal view melts things into a blur.

There is no other world. Nor even this one. What, then, is there? The inner smile provoked in us by the patent nonexistence of both.

Do I look like someone who has something to do here on earth?' —That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.

You are done for - a living dead man - not when you stop loving but stop hating. Hatred preserves: in it, in its chemistry, resides the mystery of life.

Our first intuitions are the true ones.

The fact that life has no meaning is a reason to live - moreover, the only one.

Impossible to spend sleepless nights and accomplish anything: if, in my youth, my parents had not financed my insomnias, I should surely have killed myself.

The aphorism is cultivated only by those who have known fear in the midst of words, that fear of collapsing with all the words.

The multiplication of our kind borders on the obscene; the duty to love them, on the preposterous.

Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?

I am always trying to 'preserve' things by getting other people to read what I have written, and feel what I felt.

Are you ready to go to the bedroom?" "I thought you'd never ask." He winked.

Two poor together are richer than one poor because they can somehow help each other!

In times of peace, the war party insists on making preparation for war. As soon as prepared for, it insists on making war.

I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all I still know quite certainly that just to be alive is a grand thing.

That is what the title of artist means: one who perceives more than his fellows, and who records more than he has seen.

There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual

Sometimes what is most important to us is not obvious and can be seen only by how we respond to our husbands in everyday life.

Mystical additions and subtractions always come out the way you want.

Now that Obama's president, it changes inner-city youths. They can now not just dream to be Lil Waynes and 50 Cents, but they can now dream to be Obamas.