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

• 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.
• I have the handicap of being born with a special language to which I alone have the key.
• Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.
• Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
• The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
• Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness nothing but faith, faith and freedom.
• 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.
• 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.
• The only way to avoid being unhappy is to close yourself up in Art and to count for nothing all the rest.
• The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.