“Beauty has no other origin than the singular wound, different in every case, hidden or visible, which each man bears within himself, which he preserves, and into which he withdraws when he would quit the world for a temporary but authentic solitude.”

Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn’t see Negroes hanging from its branches.

I decided to be what crime made of me.

Slowly but surly I want to strip her of every kind of happiness as to make a saint of her.

There are mornings when all men experience with fatigue a flush of tenderness that makes them horny.

One can hear all that’s going on in the street. Which means that from the street one can hear what’s going on in this house.

The vaporish cocaine loosens the contours of their lives and sets their bodies adrift, and so they are untouchable.

The despondency that follows makes me feel somewhat like a shipwrecked man who spies a sail, sees himself saved, and suddenly remembers that the lens of his spyglass has a flaw, a blurred spot — the sail he has seen.

Every premeditated murder is always governed by a preparatory ceremonial and is always followed by a propitiatory ceremonial. The meaning of both eludes the murderers mind.

The time for reasoning is past; now’s the time to get steamed up and fight like mad.

I give the name violence to a boldness lying idle and enamored of danger.

Repudiating the virtues of your world, criminals hopelessly agree to organize a forbidden universe. They agree to live in it. The air there is nauseating. They can breathe it.

Prisons! Prisons! Prisons, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible since they are the crossroads of all the malediction in the world. One cannot commit evil in evil.

Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.

Creation is not a light-hearted game. The creator commits to a terrible adventure, which is to take up-on himself all of the dangers that his creatures run.

The most reasonable man always manages, when he pulls the trigger, to become a dispenser of justice.