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

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

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

You must write for yourself, above all. That is your only hope of creating something beautiful.

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.

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