I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this–I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain.

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others.

All writing is pigshit.

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of...

I myself am an absolute abyss.

All true language is incomprehensible, like the chatter of a beggar’s teeth.

Before saying anything further about culture, I consider the world is hungry and does not care about culture, and people artificially want to turn these thoughts away from hunger and direct them towards culture.

Hell is of this world and there are men who are unhappy escapees from hell, escapees destined ETERNALLY to reenact their escape.

If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being,...

It is not opium which makes me work but its absence, and in order for me to feel its absence it must from time to time be present.

I, myself, spent 9 years in an insane asylum and never had any suicidal tendencies, but I know that every conversation I had with a psychiatrist during the morning visit made me long to hang...

Those who live, live off the dead.

I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made...

Don’t tire yourself more than need be, even at the price of founding a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.

Never tire yourself more than necessary, even if you have to found a culture on the fatigue of your bones.

All writing is filth

We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human.

[defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor.

Que les poètes morts laissent la place aux autres. Et nous pourrions tout de même voir que c’est notre vénération devant ce qui a été déjà fait, si beau et si valable que ce soit,...

When we speak the word ‘life,’ it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.

If there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames.

No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.