Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

A memory is a beautiful thing, it’s almost a desire that you miss.

I believe that if one always looked at the skies, one would end up with wings.

The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

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

The faster the word sticks to the thought, the more beautiful is the effect.

The artist must be in his work as God is in creation, invisible and all-powerful; one must sense him everywhere but never see him.

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

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.

Here is true immorality: ignorance and stupidity; the devil is nothing but this. His name is Legion.

Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.

Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life worth living.

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.

One must always hope when one is desperate, and doubt when one hopes.

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

One mustn’t always believe that feeling is everything. In the arts, it is nothing without form.

There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

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

What an elder sees sitting; the young can’t see standing.

Read much, but not many books.

Madame Bovary is myself.

What is the beautiful, if not the impossible.

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

A friend who dies, it’s something of you who dies.

The true poet for me is a priest. As soon as he dons the cassock, he must leave his family.

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

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

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

I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.

Oh, if I had been loved at the age of seventeen, what an idiot I would be today. Happiness is like smallpox: if you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.

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

There is no truth. There is only perception.

One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.

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

The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments.

Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.

Woman is a vulgar animal from whom man has created an excessively beautiful ideal.

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

Caught up in life, you see it badly. You suffer from it or enjoy it too much. The artist, in my opinion, is a monstrosity, something outside of nature.

I hate that which we have decided to call realism, even though I have been made one of its high priests.

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

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Read in order to live.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost.

The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.

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

Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

The future is the worst thing about the present.

One mustn’t look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.

Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.

Of all possible debauches, traveling is the greatest that I know; that’s the one they invented when they got tired of all the others.

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.

Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough.

As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use.

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

The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.

Success is a consequence and must not be a goal.

The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.

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

Happiness is a monstrosity! Punished are those who seek it.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

I love good sense above all, perhaps because I have none.

Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

Exuberance is better than taste.

Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.

Poetry is as precise a thing as geometry.

Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.

Judge the goodness of a book by the energy of the punches it has given you. I believe the greatest characteristic of genius, is, above all, force.

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