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

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.

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.

That everything around you give you its utter attention, think only of you, care only for you…every man wants to be a tyrant when he fornicates.

Do not breed. Nothing gives less pleasure than childbearing.

Excellence is being able to perform at a high level over and over again. You can hit a half-court shot once. That’s just the luck of the draw. If you consistently do it… that’s excellence.

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life–or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else’s life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window.

Grieving, like being blind, is a strange business; you have to learn how to do it. We seek company in mourning, but after the early bursts of tears, after the praises have been spoken, and the good days remembered, and the lament cried, and the grave closed, there is no company in grief. It is a burden borne alone.

Cruelty, very far from being a vice, is the first sentiment Nature injects in us all.

To achieve style, begin by affecting none.

For me, being with Obama or having dinner with Bill Clinton… it’s crazy. It’s mind-blowing, because where I come from is just another world. We were just ignored by politicians – by America in general.

Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.