I am a man-pen. I feel through the pen, because of the pen.

The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.

It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.

A superhuman will is needed in order to write, and I am only a man.

But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt comes off in our hands.

I have come to have the firm conviction that vanity is the basis of everything, and finally that what one calls conscience is only inner vanity.

Life must be a constant education; one must learn everything, from speaking to dying.

One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.

One mustn't ask apple trees for oranges, France for sun, women for love, life for happiness.

One never tires of what is well written, style is life! It is the very blood of thought!

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.

Stupidity is something unshakable; nothing attacks it without breaking itself against it; it is of the nature of granite, hard and resistant.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.

All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.