“I’ve been to Hell. You’ve only read about it.”

Those laws, being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest.

Sexual pleasure is, I agree, a passion to which all others are subordinate but in which they all unite.

Are your convictions so fragile that mine cannot stand in opposition to them? Is your God so illusory that the presence of my Devil reveals his insufficiency?

The idea of God is the sole wrong for which I cannot forgive mankind.

How delightful are the pleasures of the imagination! In those delectable moments, the whole world is ours; not a single creature resists us.

Prejudice is the sole author of infamies: how many acts are so qualified by an opinion forged out of naught but prejudice!

How delicious to corrupt, to stifle all semblances of virtue and religion in that young heart!

It has, moreover, been proven that horror, nastiness, and the frightful are what give pleasure when one fornicates.

I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it.

I’ve already told you: the only way to a woman’s heart is along the path of torment. I know none other as sure.

The most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution.

Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, rather the idea of evil.

If it is the dirty element that gives pleasure to the act of lust, then the dirtier it is, the more pleasurable it is bound to be.

My passions, concentrated on a single point, resemble the rays of a sun assembled by a magnifying glass: they immediately set fire to whatever object they find in their way.

Deep down he enjoys having gone so far as to deserve being treated in such a way.

Anything beyond the limits and grasp of the human mind is either illusion or futility; and because your god having to be one or the other of the two, in the first instance I should be mad to believe in him, and in the second a fool.

Reading is the work of the alert mind, is demanding, and under ideal conditions produces finally a sort of ecstasy.

Good women tell all their lives, and by day and by hour and by minute, such things that angels can read.

What are you talking about? Wait a minute, you’re getting out of the zone.’ People hate when people cross lines.

I think that it’s a crime to say you are bored when time is so precious and there are so many things to do in life: read, learn, watch.

The Bible in translation is being read to thousands and thousands in Africa. It is an integral part of their functioning and the way they look at the world.

I’m always ready for a change. I’m Irish. I’m a leprechaun.

A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.

I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.