One arrives at style only with atrocious effort, with fanatical and devoted stubbornness.
The better a work is, the more it attracts criticism; it is like the fleas who rush to jump on white linens.
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.
A memory is a beautiful thing, it's almost a desire that you miss.
The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
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.
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.
Reality does not conform to the ideal, but confirms it.
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.
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.
The cult of art gives pride; one never has too much of it.
The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my doubts.
The heart, like the stomach, wants a varied diet.
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.
What an elder sees sitting; the young can't see standing.
Nothing is more humiliating than to see idiots succeed in enterprises we have failed in.
Exuberance is better than taste.
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.
Everything one invents is true, you may be perfectly sure of that. Poetry is as precise as geometry.
All one's inventions are true, you can be sure of that. Poetry is as exact a science as geometry.