“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”

Every day in the mirror I watch death at work.

Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying.

Do as the beautiful woman: see to your figure and your petticoats. Though, of course, I am not speaking literally.

There’s no such thing as love; only proof of love.

Nothing ever gets anywhere. The earth keeps turning round and gets nowhere. The moment is the only thing that counts.

The eyes of the dead are closed gently; we also have to open gently the eyes of the living.

After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.

I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.

Youth is certain what it rejects before it knows what it will accept.

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.

I have not looked at a newspaper in twenty years; if one is brought into the room, I flee. This is not because I am indifferent but because one cannot follow every road.

Appreciation of art is a moral erection, otherwise mere dilettantism.

Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.

French people are Italian people in a bad mood.

We have beaten the living, but we cannot fight the dead.

I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction,” said Mathilde. “It is the only thing which cannot be bought.

Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!

True love makes the thought of death frequent, easy, without terrors; it merely becomes the standard of comparison, the price one would pay for many things.

I took my grandmother to the emergency room. The doctor said that she was on an artificial life support system, and that although her brain was dead her heart was still beating. I though, “we’ve never had a democrat in the family before”.

A great writer is nothing less than a martyr who does not die.

Death is as unexpected in his caprice as a courtesan in her disdain; but death is truer – Death has never forsaken any man.

Dogs will eat till they die. Cats will leave food in the dish, incomprehensible to a dog.