One can’t relive one’s life. Forgiveness is not what’s difficult; one’s always too ready to forgive. And it does no good, that’s obvious.

The whole business of your life overwhelms you when you live alone. One’s stupefied by it. To get rid of it you try to daub some of it off on to people who come to...

The foreground in a picture is always unattractive. . . Art demands that the interest of the canvas should be placed in the far distance, where lies take refuge, those dreams which blossom out of...

To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don’t deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with...

There’s a point of poverty at which the spirit isn’t with the body all the time. It finds the body really too unbearable. So it’s almost as if you were talking to the soul itself....

With two thousand years of Christianity behind him… a man can’t see a regiment of soldiers march past without going off the deep end. It starts off far too many ideas in his head.

Even diseases have lost their prestige, there aren’t so many of them left. Think it over… no more syphilis, no more clap, no more typhoid… antibiotics have taken half the tragedy out of medicine.

To philosophize is only another way of being afraid and leads hardly anywhere but to cowardly make-believe.

The more one is hated, I find, the happier one is.

When you’re not used to comfort and good things to eat, you’re intoxicated by them in no time. Truth’s only too pleased to leave you. Very little is ever needed for Truth to let go...

Life is filigree work. What is written clearly is not worth much, it’s the transparency that counts.

Living, just by itself / what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom’s the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you’ve got to look as if you...

I think all great innovations are built on rejections.

The poetry of heroism appeals irresitably to those who don’t go to a war, and even more so to those whom the war is making enormously wealthy

Almost every desire a poor man has is a punishable offence.

If you aren’t rich you should always look useful.

We’ve no use for intellectuals in this outfit. What we need is chimpanzees. Let me give you a word of advice: never say a word to us about being intelligent. We will think for you,...