“Solitude, as I understand it, does not signify an unhappy state, but rather secret royalty, profound incommunicability yet a more or less obscure knowledge of an invulnerable singularity.”

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.

Men endowed with a wild imagination should have, in addition, the great poetic faculty of denying our universe and its values so that they may act upon it with sovereign ease.

The pimp has a grin, never a smile.

There is a close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.

On him, under him, with his mouth pressed to hers, he sang to her uncouth songs that moved through her body.

Poetry is the break (or rather the meeting at the breaking point) between the visible and the invisible.

Violence is a calm that disturbs you.

I’m homosexual. How and why are idle questions. It’s a little like wanting to know why my eyes are green.

I don’t want to disappear.

Now my only income is a few royalty cheques from my books.

I can tell you this, if it wasn’t for my book royalties, I’d be in debt.

Royalty is my identity. Servanthood is my assignment. Intimacy with God is my life source.

[On Princess Anne:] Such an active, outdoorsy lass. She loves nature in spite of what it did to her.

I’ve lived on royalties all my life. It is the readers who have supported me.

The common bees will never use their sting upon the queen; if she is to be disposed of, they starve her to death, and the queen herself will sting nothing but royalty, nothing but a rival queen.

My mother told me I was blessed, and I have always taken her word for it. Being born of – or reincarnated from – royalty is nothing Like being blessed. Royalty is inherited from another human being; blessedness comes from God.

Royalty consists not in vain pomp, but in great virtues.